The breathless competition for the memoirs of the exiled Kaiser was a notable event in the publishing world. The history of literature can show nothing to resemble it. In 1918 we gravely discussed the propriety of trying this gentleman for his life. In 1922 we contended with far more heat for the privilege of presenting to a gratified public his imperial views upon his imperial policy. Americans exulted over the acquisition of these copyrights as they exulted over the acquisition of the Blue Boy. It is a grand thing to be able to outbid one’s neighbour, and pay a “record-smashing” price for any article in the market. Certain inflexible and unhumorous souls took umbrage at this catering to a principle we professed to reject, at the elevation of Wilhelm the Second to the rank of the world’s most favoured author. They thought it implied a denial of all we reverenced, of all we fought for, of all we knew to be good. It really implied nothing but curiosity; and curiosity is not to be confounded with homage. Saint Michael is honoured of men and angels; but if he and Lucifer gave their memoirs to the world, which would be better paid for, or more read? They Had Their Day “To a man,” says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna’s “Sonia,” “sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world and in the next”; a generalization which a novelist can always illustrate with a heroine who meets his views. We have had many such women in recent fiction, and it takes some discernment to perceive that in them sex seems everything, only because honour and integrity and fair-mindedness are nothing. They are not swept by emotions good or bad; but when all concern for other people’s rights and privileges is eliminated, a great deal of room is left for the uneasy development of appetites which may be called by any name we like. Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson alone stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped as far away from it as he could in “Sir Charles Grandison,” but in doing so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding’s men is not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar, gave the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine, and Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with them intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life, and was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him what she was not to Scott, “une grande réalité comme la guerre”; and, like war, she had her complications. He found these complications to be for the most part distasteful; but he never assumed that a single key could open all the chambers of her soul.