less importance to the State, which may be improperly represented if the election has been carried by fraud and corruption, than to the country at large, whose whole policy may be modified by local dishonesty.

If, now, we apply the broadly stated principle of Mr. Justice Gray's opinion to this matter, we shall see that the direction of a Representative election in all its parts, the appointment of election judges, the custody of the ballot boxes, the reception or rejection of votes, the count and the returns, being one of the "powers belonging to sovereignty in other civilized nations, and not expressly withheld from Congress by the Constitution," and "being an appropriate means, conducive and plainly adapted to the execution of undoubted powers of Congress," may be constitutional.

No other illustration is needed, at this time, of the possible effect which the new light cast upon the Constitution by the Supreme Court may have upon our future development. That it sanctions the use of more radical measures for carrying into execution the "undoubted powers" of Congress than have ever been regarded as within the legal capac

ity of the government is conspicuously evident. It may be predicted with great confidence that this decision will be made to serve, on many future occasions, as the justification of an extension of the national authority in various directions. It leaves but one step more for the court to take, namely, to declare that all powers not expressly withheld from the Congress by the Constitution, which inhere in the sovereignty exercised by other civilized nations, are vested in Congress. It may require another century to bring us to that point, as it has occupied nearly a hundred years to develop the principle of nationalism in the United States to its present position. But when the point is reached we shall find the Constitution not the "frail and worthless fabric " which it appeared to Hamilton, after thirteen years of operation, but an instrument which really authorizes Congress "to pass all laws which they shall judge necessary to the common defense and general welfare of the Union," cording to Hamilton's scheme of a government, to which the convention of 1787 did not pay even the compliment of a vote, yea or nay.

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Edward Stanwood.

ac

MISS FLETCHER, the authoress of Kismet, Mirage, and The Head of Medusa, reappears after long silence with a story of signal power and great finish.1 If the world were less busy, a work of fiction like Vestigia could not fail to attract considerable attention. As matters are, the general public may fail to discover how much of genius, of thought and feeling, of charmingly natural art, has gone to the making of this excel

1 Vestigia. By GEORGE FLEMING. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1884.

lent novel; but the few who retain an unaffected taste for good literature cannot afford to overlook it. We have in the first place a tale composed of simple but dramatic elements; we have next a faculty of character-drawing which is absolutely without flaw; and along with these we are vouchsafed a poetic sentiment that finds expression in terms never overstrained, never for an instant passing the line which divides the enduring style from the ephemeral. Then, too, there are many brief summaries of

experience or observation which attain to the value of apothegms; yet one is not made to feel that these have been sought for. The oppressive influence of George Eliot, traceable in so many writers who have tried to gain the fame of profundity by an involved and painfully philosophic statement, has not invaded the work of Miss Fletcher. "The view other people take of the less admirable consequences of our actions being apt to strike one as morbid; " "A woman loves what she can evoke, but what she marries in a man is not his best, but his average self;""A woman betrays and remembers, where a man betrays and forgets," these are not forced utterances, but they are for that reason extremely forcible. Miss Fletcher illuminates her page with flashes of this kind, but she does not allow her wisdom to assume the form of a wearying glare. Instead of the cold, electric light of modern omniscience, she turns upon us the glance of a kindly but keen and penetrating woman's eye. But the main charm about this book is its delightful simplicity, its truth, its reality. One does not suspect that the writer ever thought of her audience. It is only that Dino and Italia underwent this or that experience that they loved, suffered, and came out at last with a prospect of happiness; while the other people concerned remained simply themselves, and went on about their affairs, more or less affected by the drama that was enacting. But with what warmth, what power, what grace, all this is told! Old Sor Drea, the father of Italia, and Italia's friend Lucia, the ancient dressmaker, who wore a look "of decent disappointment with life," are drawn with the finest completeness and gusto. Their speech is full of graphic phrases like this of Drea's "I spoke too soon, and forgot to listen. My words were like so many kittens, that are born in such a hurry they 're born blind." Nor would it be easy to point to any instance of a girlish, unso

phisticated heroine more engaging than Italia. The plot is simple. Dino, the young lover, being a member of a secret society, is appointed to attempt a dangerous and probably fatal task for the revolutionists; yet, while under this deadly obligation, he cannot refrain from declaring his love to Italia, and then there comes a struggle between love and duty. He cannot go back, cannot retrace his vestigia: accordingly, there ensue misunderstandings, separation, and suspense. But these elements are handled without exaggeration, and the success of Miss Fletcher in analyzing Dino's mental state under the impending crisis, and putting it before us in the form of an unlabored picture, pays a high tribute to her skill. The book makes no pretension to greatness, and the construction is weak in some places. The lesson, also, which it suggests— that having once taken a step in life we must go straight on is rather vaguely set forth. One reads Vestigia, however, not for any lesson, but for its charm of characterization and its facile yet firmtouched art.

The Bread-Winners1 has been fortunate in the curiosity as to its authorship which, with a good deal of artfulness, was created at the beginning of its serial publication; but it enjoys the further advantage of containing material almost new to American fiction. As a "social study" it can hardly, we think, lay claim to much value, being in this respect rather fragmentary and onesided. One of the author's objects is apparently to show that the discontented workmen in this country are in the main idle, ignorant, and dissipated, like those in the brotherhood called the BreadWinners, which gives the book its name, and that these occasionally entice into their ranks an honest, efficient artisan like Sam Sleeny; also that, while they do not fairly represent the laboring

1 The Bread-Winners. A Social Study. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1884.

classes, they are able to contaminate them, and are undermining the social structure. No doubt there is much truth in the portraits here given of Bowersox, Offitt, and their fellows; but there is hardly less doubt that among the actual laborers who occupy themselves with problems of improvement in their condition a great many hard-working, intelligent, serious men are to be found; and of this kind of toilers no representative appears in the story. Neither is there any hint in it of a destructive tendency from the opposite side, that of excessive monopoly and of the corruption which is frequently one of the results of great wealth. For these reasons the author's presentation of the case may be regarded as somewhat inadequate; but his sketches of local politicians, their mean motives and petty wiles, though briefly done, are accurate and spirited. We are shown how easily Mr. Metzger, the market-man, controlled ward politics as against the gentle and upright reformer, Arthur Farnham, to whom he supplied steaks; and the way in which a small position in the public library becomes the source of political combination and bargain is amusingly exhibited. Equally good is the willingness of Pennybaker, who describes himself

66

open and square, like a bottle of bitters," to coöperate with Farnham, after being "frozen out" by his other colleagues. But the most vital contribution to the social study, if not the central figure in the whole composition, is the carpenter's daughter, Maud Matchin. To the gallery of national types thus far a very limited one she forms a distinct and significant addition. Those who have noticed the type will recognize at once the veracity of this representation; and those who are not familiar with it will understand, from the decision with which she is modeled, that Maud is no make-believe creature. A beautiful, hard, sordid, and commonplace girl, whose mind is warped by

wild desires for social advancement, she is the exponent as well as the victim of a badly regulated education in the public schools. In this instance, the author has suggested unflinchingly, and with a great deal of discernment, one of the most curious and perplexing phenomena in that condition of things which is known as American civilization. Maud is not a pleasant person to contemplate, but she is alarmingly real; and her destiny, in marrying a falsely acquitted murderer, very likely intimates only a tithe of the evil which the development of that sort of character is accomplishing in this country. Against the discouraging and possibly exaggerated background in which these coarser personages move the author sets his hero, Farnham, and his heroine, Alice Belding, with her worldly, well-disposed, but somewhat blunt-minded mother, surrounded by a group of outlined figures who stand for society in one of our lake-towns. It may be said in passing that the tone and characteristics of a town or "city" of that description are conveyed by this novelist almost to perfection, a thing which, so far as we remember, no one has even attempted to do before. It would seem that we are expected to receive Arthur Farnham as a gentleman suffering from his misplaced situation in a municipality containing, chiefly, semibarbarians; but, owing to some fault in the author's conception or execution, it is hard to feel any very strong sympathy with this bland hero. He is rich, amiable, efficient, but in no way especially fine or admirable. Impressed by the beauty, the purity, and the well-balanced womanliness of Alice Belding, he is also exposed to the absurd infatuation of Maud; and at the instant when she offers herself to him in marriage he kisses her, following the action with a brutally brief assurance that he does not love her. Mr. Temple, who began life on a Mississippi steamboat, and has risen to be the owner of iron-mills, the appreci

ator of trotting-horses and good sherry, as well as a very profane talker, somehow appeals to one as a much more manly and respectable individual than Farnham. As a foil to Maud Matchin, the author has given us Alice Belding, who in herself is unquestionably charming; but he interposes a certain sensuousness in his treatment of her, which stands in the way of an unalloyed pleasure in contemplating her perfections. As a social study we have said that this story is inadequate. As a novel, although it displays in details the impress of a practiced hand, it is by no means satisfactory we should rather incline to describe it as a massive study for a novel. The plot is vitiated by an inherent weakness, which becomes manifest in the falling-off that affects the process and the interest of the final chapters. The scene of Offitt's murder hardly rises above the plane of a reporter's bald narration; and however good this mode of description may be for a newspaper, it is not art. It may be said of the author that, although his lines are true, his graver cuts too deep at all points: the effect produced is not modulated enough. As an artist, he says too much, and suggests too little, in proportion; but although he has a great deal to learn before he can create a thorough work of art, he has concentrated in this story an amount of knowledge, of observation and reflection, that many artists may envy.

Mr. Fawcett in his recent novel1 undertakes to pluck for us the consummate flower of fashionable existence in what is now recognized as "the metropolis," at the same time that he analyzes the growth and shows us some of the roots of the plant. It can hardly escape notice that Mr. Fawcett, like the author of The Bread-Winners, betrays a kind of patrician abhorrence for the low life which he describes; yet he is able to handle it with more genuine artistic sym1 An Ambitious Woman. By EDGAR FAWCETT. Boston: Houghton, Millin & Co. 1884.

pathy than his nameless competitor, and the view he takes is broader. To the one, all beings included in the humbler class are essentially the same; to the other, discriminations are apparent. Mr. Fawcett takes the case of a girl whose early years are passed in distressing poverty, except for one brief episode of attendance at a fashionable school. She is the child of an Englishman of gentle lineage and a hard, penurious, cheap American woman, who had won her husband by a transient, aggressive beauty. There is something very pathetic and engaging about the figure of this inoffensive, unsuccessful father, who is sketched with a charming touch; and the girl's relations with him are rendered with delicate appreciation. When his last hopes had failed, "He never spoke of his future. He never spoke of hers. She understood why. Each always met the other with a smile. There was something beautiful in their reciprocal deceit. They heard the dead leaves crackle under their footsteps, but they strove to talk as if the boughs were in bud." In this passage we catch the note of a genuine poetry. The father, Twining, offers one of the few portraitures of a gentleman which have been vouchsafed to American fiction; and the way in which the girl Claire's aspirations lead her on, through many obstacles, to a position of temporary triumph in the circle towards which she has tended from the beginning is detailed with force and nicety. The author does not neglect, moreover, to contrast with the squalor and vulgarity of Greenpoint and with the heroine's dismally real mother the more glowing and successful but equally hopeless vulgarity of Claire's friends, the Bergemanns, and their associates. Opposed to these we have Thurston, the cultivated man of the world, and the talkative, nervous, au fait, kind-hearted Mrs. Diggs, both representing the older and more conservative element. Indeed,

the number of types that Mr. Fawcett has presented within the compass of this one story, and presented well, attests a wide range of observation.

..

Yet it is curious to notice that, with all this variety, the cleverness of his general idea, and the dramatic skill bestowed upon its working out, the novelist distinctly fails in the tone he adopts when treating that phase of life which is the goal of Claire's ambition. Take, for instance, his account of a dinner at Delmonico's: "Rare music stole to the guests while they feasted; the board was literally pavilioned in flowers; the wines and the viands were marvels of rarity and cost; beside the plate of each lady lay a fan studded with her monogram in precious stones. The host had very carefully chosen his guests from among the autocrats and arbiters of fashion. Claire and Hollister were the only persons who did not represent aristocracy at its sovereign height." In other places Mr. Fawcett describes dresses with a minuteness and a professional pride suggestive of the man-milliner, or dwells, for an effect of luxury, on the fact that one "butler" takes a gentleman's hat, while another receives his overcoat. Details of this sort are obtruded. The author gloats over them, and the result is necessarily vulgar; but it is his manner of speaking about them that is most at fault. He everywhere shows a taste for gaudy and florid expression, which is a part of this defective manner; elaborating trifles of statement in overloaded and forced phrases, as," Mrs. Diggs had been jocundly candid, and that was all. No baleful sarcasms had pulsed beneath her vivacious prophecies." In art, as in conversation, it is a mistake to insist loudly upon the point one is making; but Mr. Fawcett is constantly searching for means to do this very thing. He is so determined to make us see Claire's selfishness towards her amiable husband that we are simply annoyed, and are de

prived of the pathos which belongs by right to the situation. Claire herself is very well studied, and, notwithstanding this too glaring method of presentation, is almost as much a success of fiction as Maud Matchin. The story is healthy, and ends with happiness and sunshine. Mr. Fawcett's faults spring from too great an enthusiasm for his subjecttoo much interest, rather than too little; and when he shall have tempered this with a better sense of proportion and emphasis, the fact of his being so thorough a believer in the value of what he is depicting will be to his advantage in using the equipment of technical resources, already considerable, which he possesses.

Mr. Julian Hawthorne's industry is manifest in the fact that his latest novel1 is the third which he has published within eighteen months. It is evident, also, whatever else may be said about them, that these books have been written with a good deal of care. The style of Beatrix Randolph is neither strongly characteristic nor of a kind that wins much praise; but it denotes, although sometimes slipshod, a business-like attention to the work in hand. In this respect, as well as in the novelty of its plot and the arrangement of details, the new book recalls Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds, although falling below the mark of that excellent performance. The narrator's mood is here one of great good spirits, indeed of hilarity, as if he had enjoyed the joke of arraying before us such an airy tissue of improbabilities as he has woven; and he discourses with humorous cynicism upon the persons and events involved in it, saying with brilliant ease all that he has to tell. For his heroine only he shows enthusiasm. "Her body was in such fine harmony with her spirit that you could see a stirring thought turn to roses in her cheeks, or conjure diamonds to her

1 Beatrix Randolph. By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1884.