Note 24 — BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN[23] By BOOTH TARKINGTON

He has found the subject for most of his novels and plays[24] in contemporary American life, which he treats unsentimentally, spiritedly, and vigorously. Beauty and the Jacobin, like his famous and fascinating tale, Monsieur Beaucaire, is exceptional among his works in deserting the modern American scene for an Eighteenth Century situation. The story and the play are likely, for this reason, to be compared. The tone of Monsieur Beaucaire is more urbane, more whimsical, more romantic than the mood of Beauty and the Jacobin which "breaks with the pretty, pretty kind of thing. There is a new quality in the texture of the writing.... The plot here springs directly from character, and the action of the piece is inevitable. Beauty and the Jacobin gives evidence of being the first conscious and determined, as it is the first consistent, effort of the author to leave the surface and work from the inside of his characters out.... The whole of the little drama is scintillant with wit, delicate and at times brilliant and somewhat Shavian, which flashes out poignantly against the sombreness of its background."[25]