Flood Tide

by DAN CHASE [E. H.CHASE '14] ; Macmillan Co., 1918.

A novelist, son of Dartmouth, one wrinkles the brow to recall. The implication is not satisfying. Although in Flood Tide Ernest H. Chase, Dartmouth '14, has probably not achieved "the great American Novel," he has, nevertheless, shown exceptional creative power in representing a large and varied amount of American life in an imaginative style of consistent ease; and frequent beauty. And such achievement is the substance of things hoped for to those who desire the college to train not only experts in the practical arts of life, but also experts in the artistic accessories to life.

Flood Tide is reminiscent and thoughtful in mood, autobiographic in method. Coffin, the temperamental dreamer in business, tells of his life in successive localities,—the New England seacoast town of his boyhood, youth in a college town recognizably Dartmouth, business apprenticeship in Boston, manhood in commercial New York. He tells of marriage, and other sentimental projects of youth, set aside until he shall have made his fortune by the commercial project of absorbing the retail grocery business of New York in one system of stores; of the season of temperamental discontent at the zenith of mercantile success; and, at the end, the realization of happiness in the hour of business calamity.

Bald synopsis of the story, however, will not do as comment; for the story itself is perhaps inconclusive, while the distinctive excellence and beauty of the book is found in episodes, in its varied localism, in the many real people of its pages, and in the imaginative richness of its style. It is a circumstance of best portent that the first novel of a man under thirty should have been commended for sustained excellence in character portrayal, for mastery of imaginative prose style, rather than for facile story-telling.

J. Hobart Egbert '91 is the author of "Epidemic Pneumonia in the Tropics," "Some Features of Naval Surgery," and in collaboration with Owen O'Neill, of "Serums and Vaccines. These articles have been reprinted from the Yale Medical Journal and the New York MedicalJournal.

Chauncey P. Hulbert '15 is the author of "An Army's First Taste of France," in the February, 1918, number of Association Men.

"The Changing Character of Libraries," by John Cotton Dana '78, appears in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1918.