ographical studies by people entirely white, and yet important as
the work of a man not entirely white treating of a great man of his
inalienable race. But the volumes of fiction ARE remarkable above many,
above most short stories by people entirely white, and would be worthy
of unusual notice if they were not the work of a man not entirely white.

It is not from their racial interest that we could first wish to speak
of them, though that must have a very great and very just claim upon the
critic. It is much more simply and directly, as works of art, that
they make their appeal, and we must allow the force of this quite
independently of the other interest. Yet it cannot always be allowed.
There are times in each of the stories of the first volume when the
simplicity lapses, and the effect is as of a weak and uninstructed
touch. There are other times when the attitude, severely impartial and
studiously aloof, accuses itself of a little pompousness. There are
still other times when the literature is a little too ornate for beauty,
and the diction is journalistic, reporteristic. But it is right to add
that these are the exceptional times, and that for far the greatest part
Mr. Chesnutt seems to know quite as well what he wants to do in a given
case as Maupassant, or Tourguenief, or Mr. James, or Miss Jewett, or
Miss Wilkins, in other given cases, and has done it with an art of
kindred quiet and force. He belongs, in other words, to the good school,
the only school, all aberrations from nature being so much truancy and
anarchy. He sees his people very clearly, very justly, and he shows them
as he sees them, leaving the reader to divine the depth of his feeling
for them. He touches all the stops, and with equal delicacy in stories
of real tragedy and comedy and pathos, so that it would be hard to say
which is the finest in such admirably rendered effects as The Web of
Circumstance, The Bouquet, and Uncle Wellington's Wives. In some
others the comedy degenerates into satire, with a look in the reader's
direction which the author's friend must deplore.

As these stories are of our own time and country, and as there is not a
swashbuckler of the seventeenth century, or a sentimentalist of this, or
a princess of an imaginary kingdom, in any of them, they will possibly
not reach half a million readers in six months, but in twelve months
possibly more readers will remember them than if they had reached the
half million. They are ne