About a year ago Mr. W. Somer-act. Maugham, novelist and playwright, visited China. Already the London stage has home ness to his industry as a_ literary traveler; various magazines in England and the United States have exhibited internal evidence of the.same interesting fact, an-l among them is one inviting a word of comment. To the September number of the American "Bookman'' Mr, Maugham contributed a series of thumb-nail sketches—"On a Chiness Screen."" These are little studies of Peking places and people. They are graceful, very complacent, reveal no more condescension than a distinguished traveller may decently be expected to exhibit. Those who read them will do so with pleasure. Those who do not will suffer no poignant literary loss.
Place of honour on the Screen is given to a character sketch, its subject being apparently' o compound of some romantic facts in the life of a distinguished jour-valist with whose work readers of the ''North-China Daily News" are very familiar, and some creature of Mr. Somerest's Maugham's imagination—which in this instance has invented nothing fresher than the fustian puppet that one has found in a Hundred different books, Mr. Maugham writes "I heard his extraordinary story before I saw him and I expected someone of striking appearance. It seemed to me that anyone who had gone through such singular experiences must have in his over man something—singular too. But I found a person in whose aspect there was nothing whatever remarkable. He was smaller than the average, somewhat frail, sunburned, with hair beginning to turn grey though he was still under thirty, and brown eyes. He looked like anybody else, and you might sec him half a dozen times afore remembering who he was. you had happened upon him behind the counter of a department store or on stool in a broker's office you would have thought him perfectly "in place. But you would have noticed him as little us you noticed the counter or the stool. There was so little in him to attract attention that in the end it became intriguing: his face, empty of significance, reminded you of the blank wall of a Manchu palace, in a sordid street, behind which you knew "vere painted courtyards, carved dragons, and heaven knows what subtle intricacy of life."
In's few lines, Mr. Maugham proceeds to outline the Rolling Stone's personal history (it is here that he appears to follow the facts mentioned above), glances at his newspaper work, notes that it 1s "not unreadable," but conceives the not too flattering similitude of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.