Page:The Pacific Monthly volume 17.djvu/360

 has in this chapter written as interestingly of animals as any writer who has made a specialty of such subjects, and, in point of literary charm, she has surpassed them by much.

The testimony of one so versed in the subject is of some peculiar value and interest on one point in particular. Mrs. Austin deprecates the "unfounded assumption" that insanity is prevalent among sheep-herders. She says: "With all my seeking into desert places there are three things that of my own knowledge I have not seen — a man who has rediscovered a lost mine, the heirs of one who died of the bite of a sidewinder and a shepherd who is insane." Turning to a recent book by Bishop Talbot, My People of the Plains (Harper & Brothers), the worthy prelate-author puts the weight of his authority on the other side of the question. Says he: "It is not to be wondered at that such a life (the sheep-herder's) often ends in insanity. It is said that the asylums are repleted year by year by a large contingent of these unfortunates. Indeed, their lot is a most pathetic one, and they sometimes even lose the power of speech and forget their names."

Bishop Talbot's book is of the West, but not from the West, the author being now Bishop of Central Pennsylvania. For many years, however, he was the pioneer bishop in Wyoming and Idaho, and it is of his life among the mining camps of these states and others that his book treats. My People of the Plains has no claim to literary quality. It is written in an easy forthright manner and consists very largely of amusing anecdotes which this most human ecclesiast tells with unction and humor. It cannot be said to be affined in any manner with the literature of the West as literature, but for what it is, an anecdotal account of the establishment of the Episcopal Church in the Northwest, it will be found interesting and sprightly by churchman and layman alike.

The following quotation is from a novel of the West by a Western author:

"Even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness would have dictated. Once or twice, as she bit a semi-circle out of a round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor, caught McVeigh's and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful."

Had this appeared in Bret Harte's Condensed Novels or in Barry Pain's Playthings and Parodies, or in Ambrose Bierce's Prattle it would probably earn a hearty guffaw. It is to be found on page 9 of Miss Geraldine Bonner's latest novel, Rich Men's Children (The Bobbs-Merrill Co.). In this story Miss Bonner snuggles close to the popular taste for unliterature. Rich Men's Children deals with the parvenues of San Francisco society, men and women whose grandfathers were miners in early days and whose grandmothers took in washing. Her characters are, it would seem, patterned after types rather than individuals and she has drawn them with considerable skill. Skill and a certain kind of taste, rather than art, are the characteristics in her work, char- acteristics that almost redeem it from the category of eommonplaceness. But the story is of a commonplace type; the type of melo- dramatic narrative with a coating of super- ficial psychology. To its credit, be it said, the story is interesting, a quality that fulfills every requirement of the publishers and most requirements of the reading public. Certain parts of it are in a dramatic way rather strong, and it shows throughout a rather subtle observation; but these manifestations are matters of skill and ingenuity rather than art. The touch of the literary artist is not upon it. Despite copious and finicky descriptions of San Francisco, the flavor and atmosphere of the old city is suggested but never attained. The picture is one in which those who know the town can see its image, but to alien eyes it will be nebulous and imperfect. So, too, with the people in the book; they are drawn — particularly in the case of the central figure, the Bonanza King — with detail, circumstance, and precision, but even he leaves the impression of a skillfully made puppet and not of a man. He does not live. As a writer of such letters as, for years, have appeared from her pen in the Argonaut, Miss Bonner is perhaps the best woman journalist we have in America. Her style is distinctly journalistic, though above ordinary journalism. A little less vocabulary and embellished rhetoric and more feeling for the dignity of language are what Miss Bonner should cultivate in her writing of novels. As