nd by the same right,
the right of a universal appeal, to every type of child, as Mother
Goose of the Nursery Rhymes. She had only to appear--this
slender-legged, straight-haired, Early-Victorian little prude, to
enter at once the inmost arcana of the temple of art. The book is a
singular evidence of what the power of a desperate devotion can do--a
devotion like this of Mr. Dodgson to all little girls--when a certain
whimsical genius belongs to the possessed by it.

The creator of Alice has really done nothing but permit his absorbing
worship of many demure little maids to focus and concentrate itself
into an almost incredible transformation of what was the intrinsic
nature of the writer into what was the intrinsic nature of the
"written-about."

The author of this book has indeed, so to speak, eluded the
limitations of his own skin, and by the magic of his love for little
girls has passed--carrying his grown-up cleverness with him--actually
into the little girl's inmost consciousness. The book might be quite
as witty as it is and quite as amusing but it would not carry for us
that peculiar "perfume in the mention," that provocative enchantment,
if it were not much more--Oh, so much more--than merely amusing. The
thousand and one reactions, impressions, intimations, of a little
girl's consciousness, are reproduced here with a faithfulness that is
absolutely startling. What really makes the transformation complete is
the absence in "Alice" of that half-comic sententious priggishness
which, as soon as we have ceased to be children, we find so curiously
irritating in Kingsley's "Water Babies."

92. JOHN GALSWORTHY. THE COUNTRY HOUSE. THE MAN OF PROPERTY.
FRATERNITY.

John Galsworthy is almost alone among modern writers in the possession
of a genius, which in the most exact sense of that admirable word, can
only be described as the genius of a gentleman. It is a style
singularly sensitive, a little vibrant perhaps sometimes, and so tense
as to become attenuated, but of a most rare and wistful beauty. His
humor which is his weakest point is a thing of almost feminine
perceptions but quaintly pliable, as the sense of humor in women often
is, to an odd strain of peevish extravagance.

The chivalrous nobility of Mr. Galsworthy's habitual mood is at once
the cause of certain fragilities and betrayals in the mass and weight
of his art and the cause of the indignant pity which evokes some of
his finest touches.

It s