_Moon-Calf_ is very beautiful. Felix has a poetic gift sufficient to warm the record with fine verses and delicate susceptibilities upon which his adventures leave exquisite impressions. Even when his rebellion is at its highest pitch he wastes little energy in hating and so avoids the astringency and perturbation of a state of mind which is always perilous. To say Felix Fay is more or less to mean Floyd Dell, for the narrative is obviously autobiographic at many points. But were it entirely invention it would testify none the less to the affection with which this novelist feels his world and the lucidity with which he represents it. He has a genuine zest for human life, enjoying it, even when it invites mirth or anger, because of the form and color and movement which he perceives everywhere and particularly because of the solid texture of reality of which he is admirably aware. Hatred closes the eyes to a multitude of charms. If Mr. Dell suffered from it he could never have enriched his fabric as he has with so many circumstances chosen with an unargumentative hand; he could never have extracted so much drama out of dusty people. Had he been a sentimentalist he might have fallen into the soft processes of the local color school when it came to portraying the various communities through which Felix takes his way. Instead, the story is everywhere stiffened with intelligence. Felix has no adventures more exciting than his successive discoveries of new ideas. Even the women he loves fit into the pattern of his career as a thinking being, and he emerges, however moved, with a surer grasp of his expanding universe. That grasp would lack much of its confidence if Mr. Dell employed a style less masterly. As it is, he writes with a candid lucidity which everywhere lets in the light and with a grace which rounds off the edges that mark the pamphlet but not the work of art. He can be at once downright and graceful, at once sincere and impersonal, at once revolutionary and restrained, at once impassioned and reflective, at once enamored of truth and scrupulous for beauty.