From The Bookman: Review of The Yellow Book
That the Yellow Book does not mean to represent any
special school is the promising feature revealed by the
second volume. It still
has its weak points, the most
evident being the quality of the general articles,
always ex-
cepting Mr. Greenwood’s amiable and charming
“Gospel
of Content”—the thin streak of story in it hardly permitting
its
classification with the fiction. Mr. Greenwood is not
in eager sympathy with all
the tendencies of the age,
but that does not make him gloomy and morose. His
dream
of a time when many present evils will be cured by a
cheerful delight
in simple living, is presented with a lively
faith in the possibility of its
realisation. Next in interest,
first in artistic excellence, is Mr. Henry James‘s story, “The
Coxon Fund,”—subtle, fine spun,
exquisite in parts. It is
just a little fatiguing, all the same, to follow its
nervous
attempt to get at the absolute truth about a man who was
to the
believing vulgar a great inspiration and to the un-
believing vulgar a huge fraud.
It represents conscientious-
ness and intellectual interest striving passionately
for the
precision and impartiality of science. Mr. Harland‘s “A
Responsibility”—a clever study of a contest between a
perfectly realised duty and a flippant perversity of the
will—is in the same
temper. Of the poems, Mr. Alfred
Hayes’s “My Study,” is
the most sympathetic. It is proof
enough of his right—and long may it be his right
!—to
say,
MLA citation:
Review of The Yellow Book, vol. 2, July 1894, The Bookman August 1894, p. 155. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019. https://1890s.ca/YB2_review_bookman_aug_1894.html