_Wreckage_, the younger writer’s first volume, appeared in 1893, and contains seven studies of very unequal merit. Its French inspiration as well as its French emulation is at once apparent, for in place of a foreword is the simple, all-sufficing French quotation as a keynote of the type of work displayed: ‘Que le roman ait cette religion que le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom: “Humanité”;--il lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est là.’ The youth of the writer (he was only twenty-eight) must be remembered when discussing the inequality of these studies in passion, for all hinge on the old eternal theme. The last three are perhaps more finished work than the first four, and this is a pity from the point of view of the reader. _Profiles_, indeed, the longest, is also in some respects the worst-conceived attempt. It is crude and immature in conception and projection. A young officer, in love with Lily Maguire, is deceived by her for a very Emily Brontë-like figure of a bold, bad, handsome man. The girl becomes a disreputable member of the prostitute class, and Maurice, like the young fool he is, wishes to redeem her. But Lily, whom the sensuous, romantic life has taught nothing, could never, she thinks, marry a man she did not care for, although she would sell herself to the first Tom, Dick, or Harry. _A Conflict of Egoisms_ concerns two people who have wasted their lives and then utterly destroy themselves by marrying one another, for they were too selfish to _live_ even by themselves. _The Struggle for Life_ is a Maupassant[14]-conceived, but ineffectively told story of a wife betrayed by her husband, who sells herself for half-a-crown if she can go home in an hour. _Embers_ is much more effectively told, and here at last we begin to realise Crackanthorpe is getting at the back of his characters. The same applies to that able gambling story, _When Greek meets Greek_, while in _A Dead Woman_ we have Crackanthorpe at last in his full stride. Rushout the innkeeper, inconsolable for his dead wife, is as real as ‘bony and gaunt’ Jonathan Hays, who was the dead woman’s lover. How the husband discovers the dead woman’s infidelity; how he and Hays were to have fought; and how at last ‘each remembered that she had belonged to the other, and, at that moment, they felt instinctively drawn together,’ is told by a master’s hand with a slow deliberation that is as relentless as life itself. Here the narrative is direct and the delineation of character sharp. These two men with the card-sharper Simon live, while as for the women of the book we wish to forget them, for they have nothing to redeem them except possibly the little French girl from Nice. [14] Maupassant’s _Inconsolables_.