who has spent the last twelve years in prison, the irrevocable thing has already occurred and with the old man's actual appearance upon the scene no further crisis is precipitated. The characters of James and John are dryly and harshly indicated. Their mother and father might be preliminary sketches for Mr. and Mrs. Fourmy. The sketch (it can scarcely be called more), without profound subtleties, has a massive simplicity about it that commands respect. Miles Dixon is in the mood of the folk tale and is a drama in a more literal sense than the play which begins the volume, in spite of the fact that crises are presented with very little suggestion of the accumulation of emotion which makes them inevitable; the construction of the two acts is awkward; and the heroes' tendency to monologues sometimes stretches the modern convention to the breaking-point. It is a thinly veiled allegory and much of its poetry has passed over to the plane of pure intellect, but a residual essence of wistful reality remains. Mary's Wedding, besides being authentic drama, is poignant romanticism in realistic dress, the sordid happening in which the motives of action are simplified to give them the true romantic sweep. As an anti-climax there is a mildly amusing skit called A Short Way for Authors, and in a separate edition Mr. Cannan has published an ingratiating fancy entitled Everybody's Husband. The whimsy of this little play is fragrant with light feeling that might well be the perfume of a deeply rooted flower. As it happens, the glow which Mr. Cannan throws on the demure tragedy of three happy and virtuous women is only topical and illumines nothing which antedates the institution of a Christian marriage.
One does not waste a ream of good paper to damn a man's works. If they deserve damnation, time will do the trick more cheaply. Mr. Cannan is thirty-six years old. He seems yet groping through a fog of personal adventure and has not reached that point at which he can escape from his crystallizing self into full consciousness of his capacities. He has not appraised himself. In him we have a surface petrified in a conventional attitude but glowing with an imprisoned intensity, like a statue that owns a white, hot heart. Its stone eyes are blind, or so closed inward that it sees only itself—not the heart of it, but that self moulded by environment and truly its picture of the world without. Mr. Cannan has seemingly reached a point in his artistic career from which he must either go forward to an acceptance of the innate ironies of life or backward for ever to
