is never any artfulness on the surface. The tale itself is never novel, or complex; it never surprises; often it is downright banal. But underneath there is an artfulness infinitely well wrought, and that is the artfulness of a story-teller who dredges his story out of his people, swiftly and skillfully, and does not squeeze his people into his story, laboriously and unconvincingly. Needless to say, a moralist stands behind the comedian. He would teach; he even grows indignant. Roaring like a yokel at a burlesque show over such wild and light-hearted jocosities as “Paducah’s Favorite Comedians” and “Why ‘Gondola’ Was Put Away,” one turns with something of a start to such things as “Little Lutie,” “The Honest Money Maker” and “The Corporation Director and the Mislaid Ambition.” Up to a certain point it is all laughter, but after that there is a flash of the knife, a show of teeth. Here a national limitation often closes in upon the satirist. He cannot quite separate the unaccustomed from the abominable; he is unable to avoid rattling his Philistine trappings a bit proudly; he must prove that he, too, is a right-thinking American, a solid citizen and a patriot, unshaken in his lofty rectitude by such poisons as aristocracy, adultery, _hors d’œuvres_ and the sonata form. But in other directions this thoroughgoing nationalism helps him rather than hinders him. It enables him, for one thing, to see into sentimentality, and to comprehend it and project it accurately. I know of no book which displays the mooniness of youth with more feeling and sympathy than “Artie,” save it be Frank Norris’ forgotten “Blix.” In such fields Ade achieves a success that is rare and indubitable. He makes the thing charming and he makes it plain.