In considering these two books, it is impossible to avoid comparing and contrasting them with each other. Both aim at historical study as well as romantic presentation, and both are conceived from the Southerner’s view-point of the great Civil War. Both writers are famous platform figures, and neither, it may be conceded, is equipped by taste, temperament, or training, for purely literary work. Both Mr. Dixon and Mr. Watson have interests more absorbing than the production of artistic fiction, and the novels of neither can fairly be judged by the higher critical standards. One feels in reading the fiction of Mr. Dixon and Mr. Watson that it is but the vehicle of a purpose other than literary, and furthermore, that that purpose must be the presentation of truth. And here it is that the gap between the two authors begins to widen, for Mr. Dixon’s self-conscious rhetoric and platform appeal give the lie even to unimpeachable history, while Mr. Watson’s narration has the very accent of truth in its homely simplicity and utter absence of pose. “The Clansman” opens upon the political ferment at Washington just before Lincoln’s assassination, and Lincoln, Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens, and other prominent men of that period are depicted in somewhat daring detail of characterization and narration. With the revolution of the national policy which followed Lincoln’s death, the scene is shifted to South Carolina, where the horrors of reconstruction and the heroic work of the Ku Klux Klan are painted in Mr. Dixon’s most highly colored rhetoric. We have no disposition to belittle the tragedy of that period in the South, and there is no doubt that the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan did save the Southern people from much indignity and degradation, but the manner of Mr. Dixon’s narration has not the dignity of truth, and, however true his individual instances may be, the effect of the story is not that of truth. The note of heroic determination and impressive mystery which dignified the mummery of the Ku Klux Klan into a power to save Southern civilization and protect Southern womanhood, Mr. Dixon misses entirely, and his treatment, like a tawdry bit of gilding, vulgarizes what it touches. “Mr. Dixon, in literature, has repeated his successes of the pulpit and platform,” his publishers’ note informs us, and it is so far true that he has repeated in his novels the methods of his platform and pulpit successes. But save in the commercial sense, it cannot be said that Mr. Dixon’s work in fiction is a success, and it stands justified only by a prevailing bad taste and his own and his publishers’ pocket-book.