tuff, the kind of active, healthful, masterful
intellect that some men put into politics, some into science and a
few, a very few, into literature. Both "Gloria Mundi" and "The
Market Place" bear unmistakable evidences of the slack rein and the
hasty hand. Both of them contain considerable padding, the stamp of
the space writer. They are imperfectly developed, and are not packed
with ideas like his earlier novels. Their excellence is in flashes;
it is not the searching, evenly distributed light which permeates
his more careful work. There were, as we know too well, good reasons
why Mr. Frederic should work hastily. He needed a large income and
he worked heroically, writing many thousands of words a day to
obtain it. From the experience of the ages we have learned to expect
to find, coupled with great strength, a proportionate weakness, and
usually it devours the greater part, as the seven lean kine devoured
the seven fat in Pharaoh's vision. Achilles was a god in all his
nobler parts, but his feet were of the earth and to the earth they
held him down, and he died stung by an arrow in the heel.

_Pittsburg Leader_, June 10, 1899

_Kate Chopin_

"THE AWAKENING." Kate Chopin. $1.25. Chicago: H. S. Stone &
Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.

A Creole "Bovary" is this little novel of Miss Chopin's. Not that
the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a
Flaubert--save the mark!--but the theme is similar to that which
occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second "Madame
Bovary" should be written, but an author's choice of themes is
frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed
by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is
particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say
why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive,
well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes
much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers
is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but
light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects
directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present
instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. "Edna Pontellier,"
a Kentucky girl, who, like "Emma Bovary," had been in love with
innumerable dream heroes before she was out of short skirts, married
"Leonce Pontellier" as a sort of reaction fro