Word: dialectic
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Among the stories R. S. Mitchell's "The China Billiken" too obviously patterns after Stevenson's "Markheim," lacking, however, the rationale which makes that a case suggestive of a universal problem. The character study "Truth is Stranger" involves definite types and fairly accurate dialect in a story which, true or not, might well have been sacrificed to one more plausible. Nature perhaps, but not art, "looks after her freaks." One doubts, too, whether "Kernham! Wow!" will strike many as congruous with a Maine handy man. A really charming narrative, allegedly autobiographical, in the manner of Rhibany, is Ben Lion Trynin...
...Prose is much more encouraging. The Hollywood the principal story are of the solution used to and in the Monthly and nowhere else in college journalism. Mr. McCormick's story, which struggles from time to time with a dialect only half digested from "The Tragedy of Nan," suffers less on that account than one might imagine. The last page has a genuine, if uncanny, power. Mr. Jacobs's dialogue, which is not melodrama, is an amusing skit on the political honor of our Mexican neighbors...
...realism of Mr. Thomas Hardy, who would be as deeply buried in oblivion as Robert Bloomfield if his characters were as inexpressive as Tobin. It is the realism of the camera and the phonograph: It records external phenomena of action and of speech (Mr. McCormack's use of dialect is accurate); but it ends where literature should begin. It tells us nothing of the human mind and heart; it has no revealing power...
...dignity given by many of the lines, it can hardly be called completely articulate. Frank Dazey's "Sonnet" is the best piece of verse in the number. As for the "Song" by Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow, it is written in what, I fear, the author supposed to be Scots dialect. It is about a little boy who heard a robin sing, and apparently died. In any case, when the robin came back from the south, it came alone. British robins, it is true, do not go south in winter; and in general the natural history of the poem...
...Mirage" by H. L. Rogers is the first instalment of a continued story. It needs pruning, but the dashes of Old Mexican description and dialect give it decided flavor, and the reviewer for one will watch expectantly for a narrative of the rest of the Yankee station agent's experiences with Mexican peons and senoritas...