and as disagreeable as only a great piece of work can
be. And now this gentleman, who is not yet thirty, turns around and
gives us an idyll that sings through one's brain like a summer wind
and makes one feel young enough to commit all manner of
indiscretions. It may be that Mr. Norris is desirous of showing us
his versatility and that he can follow any suit, or it may have been
a process of reaction. I believe it was after M. Zola had completed
one of his greatest and darkest novels of Parisian life that he went
down to the seaside and wrote "La Reve," a book that every girl
should read when she is eighteen, and then again when she is eighty.
Powerful and solidly built as "McTeague" is, one felt that there
method was carried almost too far, that Mr. Norris was too
consciously influenced by his French masters. But "Blix" belongs to
no school whatever, and there is not a shadow of pedantry or pride
of craft in it from cover to cover. "Blix" herself is the method,
the motives and the aim of the book. The story is an exhalation of
youth and spring; it is the work of a man who breaks loose and
forgets himself. Mr. Norris was married only last summer, and the
march from "Lohengrin" is simply sticking out all over "Blix." It is
the story of a San Francisco newspaper man and a girl. The newspaper
man "came out" in fiction, so to speak, in the drawing room of Mr.
Richard Harding Davis, and has languished under that gentleman's
chaperonage until he has come to be regarded as a fellow careful of
nothing but his toilet and his dinner. Mr. Davis' reporters all
bathed regularly and all ate nice things, but beyond that their
tastes were rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded
newspaper man, in the person of "Landy Rivers," of San Francisco,
break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty
for his "paper," and no Byronic poses about his vices, and no
astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever, which is
the natural and normal condition of all reporters. "Blix" herself
was just a society girl, and "Landy" took her to theatres and
parties and tried to make himself believe he was in love with her.
But it wouldn't work, for "Landy" couldn't love a society girl, not
though she were as beautiful as the morning and terrible as an army
with banners, and had "round full arms," and "the skin of her face
was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most charming
pink upon her smooth, cool che