Royal Highness, by Thomas Mann. Translated by A. Cecil Curtis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.50.

It is no easy lot to be born of royal blood. It means a lonely life, a life of pomp and artificial splendor in which one must not taste the wine or smell the roses. It is a lofty calling. Such is the burden of this novel, told with a wealth of descriptive details and of carefully chosen incidents that make the picture complete. Out of it emerges the Prince, naïve, charming, and occasionally pathetic. He is drawn with a temperate realism that happily avoids the excesses to which psychological impressionism has carried so many modern writers. There is nothing unusual about the plot — but then it is doubtful whether there are any new plots under the sun. One regrets that the American dollar cannot be for Europe what it is for this story, the deus ex machina that brings a happy dénouement. But money cures no ills unless used properly, and European budgets are not encouraging in this respect. Implicit in the gift that was Imma Spoelmann's dowry is the guiding genius of her father's business acumen. Only this could make the gift of any permanent value. However hard his lot, the Prince is at least highly fortunate in a marriage that brings him beauty, wealth, and wisdom, the three cardinal requisites of royalty.

Beatrice, by Arthur Schnitzler. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926. $1.50.

To the numerous readers who delighted in Fräulein Else the publication in America of Schnitzler's Beatrice will bring renewed admiration of the author. Although the method that Schnitzler uses in presenting the soul of his heroine, Beatrice, is not quite as photographic as that used in Fräulein Else, it will to many seem more artistic. Schnitzler shows us a woman confronted by the problem how to save her son from the wiles of an adventurous baroness. The treatment of mother love is so entirely different from that of Mary Carr and D. W. Griffith that one hardly recognizes it as the same emotion. Schnitzler presents a situation of frank sentiment that rarely if ever slops over into sentimentalism. The book has many qualities that one finds in a Dostoevskii

novel. But Schnitzler has the great wisdom to make his book no longer than is absolutely necessary. In Beatrice he once more shows himself to be one of the few really important contemporary writers. Among the many psychological novelists there is, perhaps, none other who quite so skillfully avoids the professional affectation so very blatant in 'human documents.'

Swinburne, by Harold Nicolson. English Men of Letters series. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.25.

THE new English Men of Letters series, under the editorship of J. C. Squire, has started off promisingly with this volume on Swinburne. The author of a searching and subtle study of Tennyson, Mr. Nicolson has both the psychological insight and the complementary literary knowledge to write well of Swinburne. It is on the psychological rather than on the critical side that this book is chiefly interesting. Perhaps there is not much more to be said at this moment about Swinburne as a writer, and what Mr. Nicolson does say is on the whole just and discreet. One may quarrel with his judgment of particular poems, of 'Anactoria,' for example, —but scarcely with his general estimate. His 'analysis' of Swinburne as a man is the real contribution of the book: no one has yet stated so clearly the basic conflict in Swinburne's personality between his impulse to self-assertion and his impulse to self-abnegation, or shown so conclusively the effect this conflict had on his work.

Who's Who in China, edited by M. C. Powell. Third edition. Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1925. $8 Mexican.

THIS Octavo volume of more than a thousand pages, and containing well toward half that number of biographies of prominent living Chinamen, is an unusually valuable and timely contribution to our knowledge of Oriental affairs. An appendix contains a directory of American returned students, which, while presumably not complete, presents an impressive picture of the part the United States has played in China's recent cultural changes.

C. F. G. Masterman has been a sociologist, a journalist, a politician, and an author. At the outbreak of the war he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury in Asquith's Cabinet, and then became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with a seat in the Cabinet. Since then he has been best known as a political writer and an uncompromising foe of the Coalition. At the Treasury he was largely responsible for the framing of the National Health Insurance Act. Before his entry into the political field he had spent several years studying social questions in Camberwell, and was at one time literary editor of the Daily News.

Edmond Rossier is Professor of History on the Faculté des Lettres at the University of Lausanne, and a well-known writer on international affairs.

A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Pierre Bouscharain was for some time a professor at the University of Sheffield, and is at present attached to the Secretariat of the League of Nations.

We suspect, without having positive even decisive internal evidence, that His Leonard Huxley himself, the editor of the Cornhill. His style betrays neither the fact that he is a son of Thomas and father of Julian Huxley, nor the more compromising fact that he is also the father of Aldous Huxley. But the family rather goes in for good prose, of various kinds,

and perhaps that is evidence enough. With servants like the excellent Captain Nicola Popoff at its command, the Imperial Russian Government should never have fallen, one cannot but think, even under the stress of modern warfare. Readers of the previous installments of his Conan Doyle narrative will remember that he is the

former head of the Russian Secret Service in Siberia, and is now in exile in Serbia.

Ani Pfister is the wife of a German physician resident in China.

Manuscript fragments left by Lev Tolstoi continue to appear from time to time, and Volia Rossii, the Prague Russianlanguage review, has recently published a series of passages originally intended for use in The Cossacks. Such 'remains' do not usually add anything fundamental to our knowledge of a man like Tolstoi, but no light on so great a figure can be valueless.

Charles Fenby is a frequent contributor of sketches and tales to the Manchester Guardian and other Northern papers.

Cloudesley Brereton is a writer and lecturer on educational subjects who has the French title of Officier de l'Instruction Publique and is a divisional inspector in modern languages for the London County Council. His experience as an educational inspector has been divided between England and France, and he is the author of reports on French rural education, on a comparison between French and English secondary schools, and on physical education in France. Less officially he is something of a lyric poet, and has one volume of poems Mystica Lyrica - to his credit.

Colonel Desmond Chapman-Huston is better known under his pseudonym, Desmond Mountjoy, as a playwright, essayist, and poet, and as a contributor of articles on international affairs, the League of Nations, and literary and dramatic subjects to the newspapers and reviews. He is also the editor of Lord Curzon's speeches.

Cecil Day Lewis is a young English poet who has clearly learned much from Mr. Walter de la Mare, but has also been able to make his own use of it.