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186 garments of perfection in fear of the pain and confusion of her naked beauty. Poor art tortured with yearnings for other spheres! It is perhaps this that makes her return to us in Pink Roses in such a sorry plight. With her she brings the same Byronic young man reluctant to renounce the distinction of his grief; the same lady who, ere she pass on, will refresh him with her piquant vulgarity; and the same virgin of cool breeding who offers an ordered way of escape from paths of obscure dalliance. And like Banquo's ghost to the feast comes the persistent Jew. This time for the literary convenience of his creator, he is incarnate in a trinity, José Ysnaga, Sophina Lipinsky, and Mr. Angel. These people are cardboard replicas of the flesh that has gone before. If Mr. Cannan should die now, those who love him would hold a discreet silence about his later work. Fortunately he lives to retrieve himself. Perhaps the spectacle of American art as it is believed in by the American people will arouse in him an antagonism sharp enough to touch those defects in himself which he might almost have owed to this alien race. American art, with a few unpopular exceptions, is notoriously concerned with the purpose of making something other than it is. Art here is a superstructure erected upon the national life for its moral ornament. The difference between Mr. Cannan's attitude and that of many of his contemporaries on this side of the Atlantic is that he retains the unequivocal mental processes of the passionate reformer, while the American writers afflicted with a social conscience are for the most part casual and partial in their reactions in behalf of their faith. Mr. Cannan's feeling for the essential in the human problem makes us sympathize, humanly speaking, with his reluctance to consider it final. It is a passionate vision of incongruities which drives men to the absolute denial that is the assertion of another universe and another order. Of these are the martyrs of religion inviolate in the entireness of their pessimism. Art is indivisible and is as much the assertion of a life that coexists with us as religion is its denial. Mr. Cannan has fairly caught himself between the affirmation of his talent and the instinct which refuses it. May the future, for the glory of art, extricate him from his dilemma! Then one may be able to place him accurately among those who move toward the future of art, or those others who merely gyrate with succeeding revolutions.