cows knee-deep in water to conceal the
defective drawing of the legs. But such description as one meets
throughout Mr. Norris' book is in itself convincing proof of power,
imagination and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command,
a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly
transported. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere, effects
of time and distance, creates the illusion of life. This power of
mature and comprehensive description is very unusual among the
younger American writers. Most of them observe the world through a
temperament, and are more occupied with their medium than the
objects they watch. And temperament is a glass which distorts most
astonishingly. But this young man sees with a clear eye, and
reproduces with a touch, firm and decisive, strong almost to
brutalness.

Mr. Norris approaches things on their physical side; his characters
are personalities of flesh before they are anything else, types
before they are individuals. Especially is this true of his women.
His Trina is "very small and prettily made. Her face was round and
rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the half-opened
eyes of a baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a
little suggestive of anaemia. But it was to her hair that one's
attention was most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils
and braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara,
heavy, abundant and odorous. All the vitality that should have given
color to her face seems to have been absorbed by that marvelous
hair. It was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed the temples of
this little bourgeoise." Blix 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 cheeks." In this grasp of the
element of things, this keen, clean, frank pleasure at color and
odor and warmth, this candid admission of the negative of beauty,
which is co-existent with and inseparable from it, lie much of his
power and promise. Here is a man catholic enough to include the
extremes of physical and moral life, strong enough to handle the
crudest colors and darkest shadows. Here is a man who has an
appetite for the physical universe, who loves the rank smells of
crowded alley-ways, or the odors of boudoirs, or the delicate
perfume exhaled from a woman's skin; who is not