MARGARET C. ANDERSON _Succession_: A Comedy of the Generations, by Ethel Sidgwick. (Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.) Ethel Sidgwick is the world's next great woman novelist. Though I confess eagerly that I enjoy her novels more than any novels I've ever read--I mean it literally--it isn't on so personal a basis that I offer the judgment. But I'm confident that within ten years the critical perspective will show her on this pinnacle. Since George Eliot and the Brontës, I can think of no woman who has focused art and life so intensely into novel writing--though even as I say this _Ethan Frome_ looms up and leaves me a little uncomfortable. But the important thing is that Ethel Sidgwick is going to count--enormously. People who aren't yet aware of her (and there seem to be a lot of them) can be easily explained as that body of the public that neglects a masterpiece until it has become the fashion to acclaim it. But Ethel Sidgwick has written a novel that's more important than any number of our traditional masterpieces. For instance, it's a much more important story than _Vanity Fair_; just as _Jean Christophe_ is more valuable than _Ivanhoe_. The novel of manners has its delightful place, and so has the historical romance; but the novel that chronicles with subtlety the intellectual or artistic temper of an age is as much more important than these as Greek drama is than the moving picture show. I know there are people who'll read _Succession_ and continue to prefer Thackeray's geniality to Miss Sidgwick's brilliant seriousness and her humor that's not at all genial--but rapid, sophisticated, impatient of comedy in the accepted sense. Ethel Sidgwick might write a radiant tragedy, or a wistful satire, or a sad comedy; I can never imagine her being anything so obvious as merely comic--or genial! She doesn't laugh; she _couldn't_ chuckle; she has just the flash of a smile, and then she hurries on dazzlingly, as though things were too important to be anything but passionate about. She doesn't "warm the cockles of your heart"--or whatever that silly phrase is; and she doesn't do crude, raw things to show you that she "knows life." She goes down into the darkness rose-crowned, in Rupert Brooke's gorgeous phrase; when she goes into the sunlight it is always with something of remembered agony. That's the fine quality of her vitalism. She's too strong to be hard, too steel-like to be robust. She's like fire and keen air--to borrow another poet's phrase. She reflects life through the mirror of a vivid personality--which is one way of being an important artist. She assumes that you're also vivid, and quick, and subtle, and this gives her writing the most beautiful quality of nervousness--the kind you mean when you're not talking about nerves. In short, Ethel Sidgwick is the most definitely magnetic personality I've ever felt through a book's pages.