Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to "entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance." Usually that type of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their shortcomings to treatment, not to material--"since there is absolutely no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good taste in a novel." She has also stated that in her opinion the modern woman is over-sexed--a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which we mean some time to argue with her in these columns. Slime and the Breath of Life _The Russian Novel_, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M. de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.] Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910, did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy, however--"probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen since Goethe"--the book closes. The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin--a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction--a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression. In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren. Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance--the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance "the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth," is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us _Ruth_.