The displayers of sophisticated conceit and blasé judgment still choose to regard Albert Spalding as a student. Their criticism, superficial as it is, might have been based upon his playing of three or more years back, when, along with the most marked talent, there was an element of the conservatoire in his work. But the pupil has disappeared, and there is now purely the artistic individual. And it follows naturally that, for these same critics, unless one draws from a violin a tone as big as a string bass, it cannot be beautiful. For his two Chicago appearances he chose a work which is completely suited to him. Spalding can play Mendelssohn. This composer, with his happy delicacy, beauty, and rhythmic finesse, was safe in the hands of the artist. A sturdier or a more sensuous fiddler might have soiled the concerto. For Spalding is a spiritual aristocrat, a musician whose tonal excellencies are not florid, but elegant; not passionate, but of a fine intensity. Technic?—One speaks of technic only when there is too much or too little. Albert Spalding has, at the age of twenty-six, learned the supreme art of self-expression; and both the self which he expresses and the medium he employs for it are of the first order of fine things. HERMAN SCHUCHERT. Book Discussion Love’s Highway _Love and the Soul Maker_, by Mary Austin. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.] There is a certain generic myth, outcropping whenever the discovery of some mysterious, hidden treasure is in question, which is that the discoverer may possess only so much of it as he can carry away on his own person. Whenever I met this climax in my childish reading my greedy little soul rebelled because the hero might not have all that his eyes could see instead of the negligible bit that he could handle with his own muscles. Experience has taught that under no circumstances can a man own more than he possesses within himself; this is as true of material art forms as it is of culture and education. It is almost tragic in its truth when we look about and see such a wealth of apparent happiness and love and then look into our own impoverished hearts. We may not covet either our neighbor’s automobile or his wife, but frequently we do covet, in spite of good intentions, the happiness that he derives from that automobile and that wife. Particularly weak are we when we look down love’s highway and see what we believe to be limitless and ideal joy. The little orbit in which we move seems sadly askew, and it takes a book like Mary Austin’s _Love and the Soul Maker_ to make us understand that all the topsy-turviness of the present is but the labor-pain of a saner, truer, happier future.