Reviews of the New Books

Novels of the Month: a Brief Survey

BURTON RASCOE

DEIRDRE (Macmillan) is the first, and a very splendid, achievement in the great work James Stephens has set for himself, of making literature out of the folk lore of Ireland. His aim, it appears, is to keep as closely as possible to the most widely accepted versions of Irish myths and to preserve so far as he is able their original Gaelic flavor. He is especially fitted to do this, for, Irishmen tell me, his own idiom is more authentically Gaelic that that of any other writer in Dublin. After these qualific aborts the essentially romantic imagination, the precious capacity lor droll philosophizing, and the fantastic whimsy of the author of The Crock of Gold, (one of the finest imaginative works of our time), and we have reason to expect him to make a beautiful and moving story out of the high history of Deirdre, whose career corresponds in Irish myth with that of Helen of Troy. Mr. Stephens has resisted his inveterate tendency to be funny, and, although this restraint may disappoint those who read him only for the delightful playfulness of his humor, it preserves the illusion the glamor of this tragic tale which might vanish under the slightest effort at mockery. The ingredients are love hatred, loyalty, treachery, war and mighty events, and they revolve around Deirdre, whose beauty filled all men with love and of whom the poet prophesied that she would bring evil to Ireland, The tale fades out, rather than ends; but, then, so does the Iliad.

IN Riceyman Steps (Doran), Arnold Bennett has abandoned, at least for a moment, his I.ieans and Pretty Ladies, his whimsical Prohacks and his efficient young manicures who lead their own lives; he has gone back to the mood, the method, the manner and material of the Clayhanger series, and has produced his most moving tale and his soundest work of art since the days when he secured the literary property rights to the Five Towns. It is a story of love among the indigent in the mean streets of London, a tragic talc of the slow disenchantment of a fine-fibred, courageous widow who supported herself by keeping a small shop, and who sees her late romance fade under the ugly miserliness of her busband. Henry Earlforward is one of the most perfectly drawn figures in Mr. Bennett's gallery of portraits; the atmosphere of the London quarter, in which the scene is laid, is marvelously evoked; and the novel, though concerned with drab people, glows with charm.

D.H. LAWRENCE, the indefatigable, has added to the four books of his own composition in one season a translation of Maestro-Don Gesualdo (Seltzer), from the Italian of Giovanni Verga. This novel depicts the rise and tribulations of a modern Trimalchio in class-conscious Italy The title bestowed upon Gesualdo is the key to the irony of the tale: the crude and pathetic parvenu, Gesualdo, whose shrewd acquisitive instinct has made him the chief financial power of his native town, is called "Maestro-Don" because those who know his origin and his acquired dignity cannot dissociate them; therefore, they address him through habit as "Maestro" the designation of a workman, and then add "Don" the novel is massed with detail and the story swings heavily through a large population of incidental characters; but it is a good satire, couched in a racy vernacular.

LOVE Days (Knopf), by Henrie Waste, is a tedious and orotund recital in substantiation of the thesis that if you kiss promiscuously enough you will eventually find your true love.

NOWOWHERE Else in the World (Appleton), by Jay William Hudson, is the story of an arlistic revolt, who, afer a period of distaste for the crude vulgarity of American industrial society, finaly embraces a business career in Chicago and ecstatically hugs it to death, is another book in which the hero or the author discovers that the steamsfiovcq and the oil derrick are more bgautjfui than the Parthenon, and that the corset ads are the finest literature of the period The section dealing with the hero's career in a jerkwater college is excellent, and Mr. Hudson has got certain aspects of Chicago into words more adequately than any other novelist; but the book suffers from theory.

IN doing his Roosevelt (Atlantic Monthly Press), Lord Charnwood had, obviously, to tread mineingly to keep off a lot of people's toes. There are too many relatives and associates of T. R. alive,and Roosevelt's death is too recent an event, for any one to write a definitive life of the late president; and one wonders why Lord Charmvocd undertook to write one, especially as a memorial biography commissioned by the family and friends. Lord Charnwood has been discreet enough not to attempt an objective study, but to synthesize the impressions Roosevelt created all over the world as well as at home. Indeed, he subtiti ties the book, "A World View", and that rather lets it out. For what theauthor intends it to be, it is a highly competent and interesting piece of work,

ISLES of Illusion (Small, Maynard), an anonymous diary, edited by Bohun ]yynch, is what most records of adventure in the youth Seas are not—a candid record of what happens to a civilized white man accustomed to a colder climaqc when he remains any considerable icngth of time in a malarisa-infested tropical region and has to earn his living there like a native. It is an absorbing story of hardship and disease; and the writer's taking to wife a native woman is not the charming sort of romance it js usually depicted to be. To read this hook will cure many of the itch for the tropics, contracted from such gaudy romances as White Shadows in the South Seas

RED Blood (Harper), by Harold H. Armstrong, is the history of the rise of of a typical American business man, treated honestly, objectively and without the now fashionable satirical intent. A a vigorous piece of characterization and documentation,somewhere between Frank Norris' Octupus and Dreiser's The Titan in points of significance and interest. Armstrong is arriving.

JEEVES (Doran), by P. G. Wodehouse, the most entertaining of the writers of cornjcai fiction, relates the droll expedients of an English valet to keep his young master and friends out of the hot water a of an amour.

THE DANCE of Life (Houghton, Mifflin) is the quintessence of Havelock Ellis's monumental investigations into the meaning and functions of life. It is a magnificent, prose poem, in which the bravest and most intelligent British man of letters expounds a most charming and sensible philosophy of life. One of the great books of this generation.