Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/213

Rh defects of character and style that belong to a close representation of nature. "A Lost Masterpiece," by George Egerton, is not so interesting as the author's "Keynotes," though it shows the same qualities of style. The subject is too unfruitful, merely a literary disappointment, because a bright idea has been chased away. "A Sentimental Cellar," by Mr. George Saintsbury, written in imitation of the essayists of the eighteenth century, associates the wines in a cellar with the loves and friendships of their owner. To others the vinous treasures would be "good wine and nothing more"; to their present owner they are "a casket of magic liquors," a museum in which he lives over again "the vanished life of the past." The true French bookless bourgeois often calls his cellar his bibliothéque, meaning that he values its lore as preferable to that of scholarship; but Mr. Saintsbury's Falernianus associates his wines with sentiment rather than with knowledge.

On the whole, the literature in the first number of, is adequately representative of the modern English literary mind, both in the observation of reality and in style. It is, as I say, really literature and not letterpress. I rather regret, for my own part, the general brevity of the pieces which restricts them to the limits of the sketch, especially as the stories cannot be continued after the too long interval of three months. As to this, the publishers know their own business best, and are probably aware that the attention of the general public, though easily attracted, is even more easily fatigued.