sion as an approach. For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of self-defence, the lie "of obligation" cannot be juggled away; and it is the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend's secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil, while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as consecrated and de rigueur. But the gentleman, I venture to say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.

It is easier-as some sociologists do-to plot the curves of a desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be

home-keepers indeed- perpetually cradled who need never lie. Literal truth is imprisoned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, affecting to be the ruler of the world. Even the faithful know that the claim is vain. The lies of obligation and convention are not, in the deepest sense, unveracious; for they are not preeminently intended to deceive. We expect them of other civilized beings and expect other civilized beings to expect them of us. Speaking such falsehoods, and such falsehoods only, we are still on truth's own ground. The lie told for the liar's own sake marks the moment when a man has passed from beneath her standard, across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is already hot-foot into the jungle.

I

MISS ALCOTT'S NEW ENGLAND

REMEMBER being very much impressed -and not a little shocked-when a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott's stories. It had never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. Little Women was as universal as Hamlet. I remembered perfectly that French playmates of mine in Paris had loved Les Quatre Filles du Docteur March (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated). If children of a Latin-moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic tradition could find no flaw in Miss Alcott's presentment of young life, I could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it sympathetic.

I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott's special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend said was simply

that the people in the books were too underbred for her to get any pleasure out of reading about them. My friend was not, when I knew her, a snob; and I took it that she had made the criticism originally at a much earlier age. All children are as snobbish as they know how to be; and I fancy that the child's perennial delight in fairy-tales is not due solely to the epic instinct. One is interested in princes and princesses, when one is eight, simply because they are princes and princesses. Of royalty, one is perfectly sure. I have never known a child who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a princess in disguise, or who felt any real sympathy with the princess who was only a disguised goose-girl. You do not have to expound the Divine Right to any one under twelve. Peasants are an acquired taste; and socialism is an illusion of age.

Out of such axioms as these, I made my explanation of my friend's heterodoxy. I remembered my own reaction, when very young, on a story that centred in a masked ball to which all the inhabitants of the kingdom were bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, and all the court ladies went as milkmaids-a mere rounding out of the Petit Trianon episode. The moral was obvious; and I recall being frightfully disturbed by my own absolute certainty that, if I had been going to a masked ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as

grandly as I possibly could. I should never have gone as a milkmaid, so long as the costumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps mean that I was, on the whole, nearer to the milkmaid than to the court lady? I did not like the story, but I have never, to this day, forgotten it. Perhaps my friend had been of the same age when she discriminated against Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contemporaries had made no such discrimination. As I say, it set me to thinking. Since then, I have read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many times, and I think I understand.

The astounding result of re-reading Miss Alcott at a mature age is a conviction that she probably gives a better impression of midcentury New England than any of the more laborious reconstructions, either in fiction or in essay. The youth of her characters does not hinder her in this; for childhood, supremely, takes life ready-made. Mr. Howells's range is wider, and he is at once more serious and more detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can be compared as little as Madame Bovary and the Bibliothèque Rose. Yet, although their testimonies often agree, his world does not "compose" as hers does. It may be his very realism his wealth of differentiating detail, his fidelity to the passing moment-that makes his early descriptions of New England so out of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott is con