Then, as he approached sixty, Mr. Cahan gave us "The Rise of David Levinsky", a solid mature novel, into which are compacted the reflections of a lifetime. The publisher's notice called it "a story of success in the turmoil of American life." Probably the writer of those words intended to help the book by the appeal which "success" makes to the American mind, for no reader, not even a publisher's clerk, could miss the immense irony of the story. It is indeed the story of a failure. The vanity of great riches was never set forth with more searching sincerity. The helplessness of the individual, even the strong and prosperous, in the economic whirlpool, the loneliness and disillusionment only partly assuaged by pride in commercial achievement, the sacrifice of the intellectual life to the practical, these are the fundamental themes of the book. Levinsky, with the instincts of a scholar and a desire for the finest things in life, is swept into business by circumstances which he hardly understands himself and against which he is powerless; once in the game he makes the most of his abilities, but he never ceases to regard his visible good fortune as poor compensation for the invisible things he has missed. His wealth forces him to associate with all that is vulgar and acquisitive in Jewry and isolates him from all that is idealistic. He finds that he cannot even speak the language of the woman he most admires. Worse still, he is out of sympathy with the aspirations of millions of poor Jews from whose ranks he has sprung. He has no sympathy with those who would break the game up or make new rules, yet he sees that the game is hardly worth playing, even for the winner. "Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man." The portrait of David Levinsky is a portrait of society, not simply of the Jewish section of it, or of New York, but of American business. And business is business whether done by Jew or Gentile. If Levinsky is a triumphant failure, he is so because American business, which shaped him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent regard for humanity, a miserable monster of success. Not that Levinsky is an abstraction, or that the novelist is forcing a thesis. Far from it. The personality of Levinsky is as sharply individualized as the hero of Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors," though with a different kind of subtlety, the subtlety not of detached analysis, but of naively simple self-revelation, which of course is not so simple as it sounds.