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610 as the smudged ending of The Clanking of Chains reveals. Above all, he is not sufficiently aloof from his creations to convey that sense of inevitability without which the realistic novel becomes as fatally artificial as the soothing romances of the gladdest of best sellers. In fine, although the novel has taken on a new lease of literary life in Ireland, the field is still without a really fine flower. It may be that the recrudescence of fiction is simply the suppressed desire of Sinn Fein Ireland to express and explain herself, a political rather than a literary phenomenon. If that is so, another hope must be deferred, for the need for self-expression grows more imperative with every suppression. As these lines are written it is announced that all American papers have been seized at the post-office by those ever-so-competent military authorities.