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Old Mole and revived Old Mole's problems in Young Earnest. In Young Earnest the speculation is so much more intense, and parallel difficulties are faced by characters so much more compelling than those which move through the somewhat lagging pages of the first written book, that Old Mole, except for some incidental intuitive achievement, can safely be ignored. In the nature of a flash of genius but quite casual from the standpoint of the author, is the account of Old Mole's emotion when he hears the girl whom he has married—merely because to marry was easier than not to marry—despised for his sake, and suddenly adores her. The story of this truant professor is told with those confirmed habits of expression which are called style. The language has no richness in it but a mellowed dryness as of old wood, and such details of psychological observation as are contained in the account of the man’s awakening toward his wife seem fairly to leap out at us from the monotony of pleasant words. Further on in the same volume we are introduced to the jealousy of the chivalrous husband toward his wife’s child by another man, a theme that might have inspired the greatest of realists. With Cannan the reactions of the pair toward each other are not the artistic end but the little considered means for promoting the same progression of rearrangement. The baby dies, and one feels that this was to get rid of the annoyance of a tremendous motif which was sure to assert itself against the superficialities of plot, Mr. Cannan sacrifices life to exploit a theory of those social devices which make life easiest lived. He not only confuses the means with the end but he confuses the means with the beginning. Nowhere does his reality coexist with himself. It is like the preacher's eternity which begins to-morrow. One of the people in Old Mole says, "The universe was not made for man but man for the universe." This is worthy of Thomas Hardy, but the author in question accepts the fact with the Emersonian outlook of a Protestant divine. He is evidently convinced that the body has "brutish" functions which an exalted mind may elevate. As with all dualists, there is a naive sanctimoniousness in his resentment of an urge which the individual cannot qualify, and turning from lust, he, discovers that quality of obliviousness most characteristic of lust in a religious experience. That his God is called Humanity in no way alters the type of the emotion, and it prevents him from detaching his art from a conception of nobility. That he may be repelled by the complacency