Victorien Sardou. A Personal Study. By Blanche Roosevelt. (Kogan Paul,
Trench, and Co.)—Miss Roosevelt, though Mr. Beatty-Kingston describes her in glowing colours, seems to us something of a "ghoul," to use a phrase of Lord Tennyson's. "The world wants to know all about its celebrated men and women," she writes, what they are, where they live and how, what they eat and drink, Sze." Perhaps it does want to know, but it does not follow that it ought to be told. However, there is not much harm in this book, and there is a good deal that is quite legitimately interesting. M. Sardou's early struggles (he was a doctor without practice, a hack writer who did not find it easy to live, and his first play was an utter failure) and his mode of work are among the things which we are glad to read about. The literary element seems quite a secondary matter to the dramatist. His " mise-on-sane books contain scarcely a word of dialogue." "Le geste fait naitre la parole: trouvez le geste, et vous en aurez m6me de trop." This is not without significance for those who want to know why novelists do not write plays. There is a curious description of Georges Sand. Sardou had pictured to himself something of the Sappho kind, and he saw a fat woman like a cook, who was smoking a cigarette. Who, we wonder, was the "great poet' whose drunkenness and foul language so disen- chanted his worshippers P If the story was told, the name should have been given. Otherwise, there is an unconscious impulse to fit it on to some name,
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