Quarrels there will be and condemnation arising from _Young Earnest_, but will they be because readers think Mr. Cannan does not understand whereof he writes or because he is audacious enough to describe a man who would not accept shams? We may not like the subject any better than we would a painting of a maimed or ugly person, yet that objection does not destroy its art, and art it has, in an unusual degree. Only a skilled writer could depict a man doing sensual things without being a sensualist, and René was just the opposite of that. All his sins were of the spirit rather than of the flesh. His ambition in life was to find happiness at any cost. He desired love as many desire money and with as little consideration for others, and although hopelessly at odds with conventional standards and prudish morals it seems to me that the study of Young Earnest’s efforts to understand life and his own self is rather a glorious attempt, and that Gilbert Cannan has been decidedly courageous to try to reduce to printed terms the emotions, aspirations, cravings, and blunders of a young man too honest to accept deceits, yet too cowardly (or perhaps too brave) to stand by his blunders. Not a pretty story, of course, but life is seldom pretty when it is frank, and his stumbling “from one love to another” is not the expression of sensuality but rather a spiritual attempt to live out the best that was in him. The book has many passages of beauty, many expressions of keen philosophy which seem to indicate that the author’s soul belongs to the divine side of life—not to its sordidness. So wonderfully does he reproduce mediocrity, middle-class respectability, and the vital if less commendable phases of Mitcham Mews that one is led to believe that all of life—from visions to slums—is unfolding to him, and that no matter what his subject, his pen will paint a picture that rings true. One could hardly find a more subtle task than has been accomplished in _Young Earnest_—that of painting a man who was not a sensualist doing sensual things. That Mr. Cannan knew precisely what he was doing is revealed in the words that he puts into the mouth of one of his characters who describes René as being a man “simply inappropriate in a community of creatures who live by cunning.” M. A. S. Nietzsche in Fiction _The Encounter, by Anne Douglas Sedgewick._ [_The Century Company, New York_]