Mr. ROMER WILSON has devoted the nearly three hundred pages of his _Martin Schuler_ (METHUEN) to describing what it feels like to be a genius, and, speaking from a very limited knowledge of this class, I should say that he had mapped the mind of a genius of a certain sort very well. His estimate of the creative artist's anguish of emptiness rings true, and will, perhaps surprise the people who think that his lot, like a policeman's, is a very happy one. His _Martin_, who struck me as a very unpleasant young man, was a composer who meant to achieve immortality, but turned down the broad way of musical comedy and acquired money instead. Just in time he repented and wrote a grand opera, and then Mr. WILSON cut short his career in a fashion that seemed to me regrettably hackneyed, which was the only reason why I shared the other characters' sorrow. Why so many people, all rather nasty people too, came to devote themselves to _Martin_ I could not discover, although I had the publisher's word for it that he was "attractive"; but perhaps his genius accounted for it. Probably it is my duty to declare here that _Martin_ and his friends were almost all made in Germany before the War, but as they are exceptionally disagreeable and quite unlikely to inspire anyone with an unjust tenderness for their nation I have no hesitation in recommending the book as a clever study of temperament and a just picture of a part of the German musical world as it was when one last knew anything about it. * * * * *