Mr. Cahan knows how to think through his characters, by letting them do the thinking, as if it were their affair and not his. At the same time he does not perform (nor does any other artist) that foolish and meaningless operation, as expressed by a great poet through a young critic, of holding "the mirror up to nature." Nature in a mirror is just nature, not nature thought out, excogitated, turned to human uses, interpreted in human words. And this is the place to say that Mr. Cahan knows how to use words. There are no great phrases in this book. A simple and (intellectually) honest business man writing his autobiography would not use a great phrase; such a phrase might issue from some enviable person in that intellectual life from which Levinsky was excluded. But there is no banal or inept phrase. Such a man as Mr. Cahan intends Levinsky to be, a man trained in the Talmud, which means verbal sense, and hammered by the facts of life, which means a sense of reality, and a wistful failure, which means imaginative retrospection, says things in a direct, firm, accurate style. There is no lack of emotion; strong feeling, expressed or implied, runs through the book from beginning to end. But there is a complete absence of eloquence, a deliberate refraining from emphasis, an even manner of setting forth ideas and events impartially for the value inherent in them, an admirable method, the method of a philosophic artist. Here is life, some of it is good, some of it is bad; it is all somewhat pitiable, to be laughed at rather than cried over; nobody is deserving of indignant blame or abuse. It is our business to understand it as well as we can; and though we never can see it in its entirety or with complete clearness, if we make an honest effort to record events and delineate personalities, the events will arrange themselves in a more or less intelligible sequence, and the personalities will be their own commentary upon themselves. An obvious method, but you will read many a book to find one skilful application of it. It seems to me the method most often employed and carried to the highest degree of perfection by the great Russians. I am driven to the timidity of "seems" because we do much talking about Russian novels without having read many of them or understanding what we have read. But better-informed critics than I have noted that one characteristic of the Russian novel is a benevolent impartiality in its treatment of all kinds of people and a calm contemplation of events horrible, gay, sad, comic. A revolutionist can portray, in fiction, a commissioner of police, whom in real life he would be willing to kill, with a fairness that is more than fair, with a combination of Olympian serenity and human sympathy. He can be a virulent propagandist when he is writing pamphlets, and when he writes fiction he can forget his propaganda or subdue it to art, that is, to a balanced sense of life.