the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably right; but taken as a
whole his most serious novels, however lifelike and well rounded their
surfaces may seem, lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought.

Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intellectual
consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever building a very
notable realistic plot has kept him from ever creating any very
memorable characters. The author of ten novels, immensely popular for
more than a score of years, he has to his credit not a single
figure--man or woman--generally accepted by the public as either a type
or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen his dramatis
personae from without and--doubtless for that reason--has apparently
felt as free to saw and fit them to his argument as he has felt with his
plots. Something preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe,
something cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge Whipple
of _The Crisis_, above all something both tough and quaint in the
up-country politician Jethro Bass in _Coniston_ resisted the
argumentative knife and saved for those particular persons that look of
being entities in their own right which distinguishes the authentic from
the artificial characters of fiction.

For the most part, however, Mr. Churchill has erred in what may be
called the arithmetic of his art: he has thought of men and women as
mere fractions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but
romances must be the units and the total work the sum or product of the
fictive operation. Naturally he has succeeded rather worse with
characters of his own creating, since his conceptions in such cases have
come to him as social or political problems to be illustrated in the
conduct of beings suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some
measure from history, with their individualities already more or less