be made a tool in the hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely turns his face toward a new order.  In the same precipitate fashion the heroine of The Dwelling-Place of Light, who has given no apparent thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth.  In these books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments; the author’s sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought.

Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very memorable characters.  The author of ten novels, immensely popular for more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single figure—­man or woman—­generally accepted by the public as either a type or a person.  With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis personae from without and—­doubtless for that reason—­has apparently felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his plots.  Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple of The Crisis, above all something both tough and quaint in the up-country politician Jethro Bass in Coniston resisted the argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from the artificial characters of fiction.

For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be called the arithmetic of his art:  he has thought of men and women as mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the fictive operation.  Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some measure from history, with their individualities already more or less established.  Without achieving fresh or bold interpretations of John Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or Lincoln, Mr. Churchill has added a good deal to the vividness of their legends; whereas in the case of characters not quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro Bass, he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding American politics with his sense of spaciousness and color in the American past.