Book Reviews

The hearts of young men have always provided Mr. Cabell with a ready stamping-ground. Youth which has not yet lost its imagination, which is still hoping its disillusionments are bad dreams, slips into the spirit of the Cabellian fantasy with too ardent asperity, so that when Jurgen or Manuel awakens in the world of things as they are, youth suffers more than any old man may. None of us have ever had much sympathy with the church-league critics of the manners of Poictesme, since the very elements which aroused the righteousness of these people formed an essential and legitimate part of our dreams and our ideals. We were thankful that if life held little promise to our masculine delicacy of desire,Jurgenat least provided us with a satisfactory literature. That is more or less our reason for wishing Mr. Cabell’s tales to go unchallenged, and for our thinking his formerly slight eroticism a necessary factor in the weaving of his enchantments.

Now, even the illusion of Poictesme has worn thin from over-handling. Still in theHigh Placethere are those rare moments of adventure or frustration we have learned to expect and love. But Mr. Cabell has disclosed that his mind can be filthy as well as fantastic. His double meanings are here inexcusable both for their schoolboy crudity and for their quite obvious irrelevance to the general scheme of things; it is not a question of morals, but of taste. When certain passages remain inexplicable except as unadulterated smut, we cannot help smiling at the irony of the exalted title. What Mr. Cabell regard as hisHigh Placeis sometimes far too low to sustain his reputation. We advise those who are unacquainted with this author to begin elsewhere in his works.

D. G. C.

James Elroy Flecker is dead. But from London comes word that “Hassan”, his latest and great work, is playing,and has for months played, to packed houses. Flecker lived most of his life in the Orient, and has in this play indelibly caught its beauty, its poetry, and its cruelty.

The setting of “Hassan”, and the manner in which it is outlined through the characters, is the feature of a work whose merits are legion. The background is one of liquid beauty, a tissue woven of moonbeams and fancies, and of all the things in which the East finds inspiration. The lyric passages are delightful, and sometimes burst spontaneously into haunting poetry.

Upon this background there move living characters. Hassan, a humble confectioner of Bagdad at the time of Haroun Al Raschid, is an ugly man with a poetic soul. He falls in love, and his love is not returned until the Caliph Haroun raises him to power. With loss of power, love leaves him again. Subtle touches of humor and innuendo abound in the play, and serve to outline its essential tragedy.

In the Oriental spirit which “Hassan” so well portrays, there is a gorgeousness of beauty which is too highly colored long to retain its first unfaded charm for a Westerner. Perhaps the reason why “Hassan’s” influence holds is that in it a Westerner has given his own practical application to the scenes he describes, from a mind kindred to our own. However that may be, the work is strong and fundamental, and fascinatingly interprets an unfamiliar view of life. The setting is painted in enduring colors from Hassan’s love lyric to those final deep-toned stanzas:

“We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall goAlways a little further; it may beBeyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,Across that angry or that glimmering sea.“White on a throne or guarded in a caveThere lives a prophet who can understandWhy men were born; but surely we are brave,Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”

“We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall goAlways a little further; it may beBeyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

“We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further; it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

“White on a throne or guarded in a caveThere lives a prophet who can understandWhy men were born; but surely we are brave,Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”

“White on a throne or guarded in a cave

There lives a prophet who can understand

Why men were born; but surely we are brave,

Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”

R. P. C., JR.

“The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall” is, in Mr. Hardy’s own words, “a new version of an old story”. And yet this version, it would seem, lies closer to Gottfried of Strasburg and the traditional Celtic story of “Tristram and Iseult” than many we have had of late, closer in spirit at least if not in actual incident. This authenticity of spirit might have been expected, though, for the realm of the tragic queen “at Lintagel in Lyonnesse” lies within Mr. Hardy’s own special province of Wessex, and Queen Iseult and Iseult the Whitehanded are after all but a step removed from the heroines of the Wessex novels.

Mr. Hardy has chosen for his play, with an admirable sense of the dramatic, that point in the story of the “twain mismated” when for the last time the paths of their lives converged, when for the last time Tristram came from Brittany—to see his Iseult the Fair and after a brief moment of bitterness and ecstacy to fall at her feet, stabbed in the back by her husband, King Mark. The spirit of Mr. Hardy’s play and the spirit of Mr. Hardy’s characters are, I have said, essentially that of the thirteenth century chronicler. There is a certain rudeness and strength and withal a certain other-worldliness against which the slender flame of the passion of Tristram and Iseult burns with exceeding brilliancy. There is a certain subtlety in the painting of such emotions as the jealousy of the Queen Iseult and of Iseult the Whitehanded in such a line as the Queen Iseult’s—

“Love, others’ somewhile dainty,Is my starved, all-day meal!”

“Love, others’ somewhile dainty,

Is my starved, all-day meal!”

—which gives to these figures of legend an unsuspected glow of life. But through it all there is the firmness of touch and the strange broken felicity of expression which we have found so characteristic of Mr. Hardy.

“... the seas sloped like houseroofs all the way.”

says Iseult of her journey to Brittany.

“I’ll fade your face to strangeness in my eyes!”

are Tristram’s words to his wife, Iseult the Whitehanded. Somewhere Iseult speaks of “the self-sown pangs of prying”. And in the music of such lines as those of Iseult the Whitehanded, broken with tragedy, lies the note of the play itself:—

“... This stronghold moans with woes,And jibbering voices join with winds and wavesTo make a dolorous din!...”

“... This stronghold moans with woes,

And jibbering voices join with winds and waves

To make a dolorous din!...”

Plays of the nature of “The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall” demand, it must be remarked, a curious type of production. On its title page Mr. Hardy has called his work “a play for mummers in one act requiring no theatre or scenery”. So it will be given by the local players in Mr. Hardy’s own town of Dorchester. He has himself, in the preface to “The Dynasty”, suggested for “such play of poesy and dream ... a monotonic delivery of speeches, with dreamy conventionalized gestures, something in the manner traditionally maintained by the old Christmas mummers, the curiously hypnotizing impressiveness of whose automatic style—that of persons who spoke by no will of their own—may be remembered by all who ever experienced it”. The effectiveness of such a manner, coupled with Mr. Hardy’s blank verse and the brooding accompaniment of the chorus of chanters—the shades of dead old Cornish men and the shades of dead Cornish women—would be very great indeed.

It is enough to say, though, that Mr. Hardy has held his position of eminence for almost fifty years and that in “The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall” his power has not been lost. In such lines as—

“Nor life nor deathIs worth a special quest,”

“Nor life nor death

Is worth a special quest,”

we read the old hand.

R. L. P.

In “Young Felix”, Frank Swinnerton has thoroughly exposed the Hunter family. Grumps, Auntie Lallums, Ma and Pa, Godfrey and Felix—every one is perfectly distinct and deeply comprehended. It is a beautiful tale of bubbling mirth overcoming every disaster, for there is the charm of the Hunter family—no matter how great the opposition may be, their infinite good-nature rises to the top and the day is saved. As some one said of Felix, “He would be a great success in any profession—or a great failure”.

It is a pleasant contrast to the presentday novels of youth in America. If the lack of sophistication in the young Felix seemsimprobable, at least it is better to err on that side than the ultra-mature nature of our own precocious urchins. There is quite enough humor in this book without exaggerating the unruly side of youth. The story throughout is of the lowest stratum of middle-class life already so well handled by Arnold Bennett, the early H. G. Wells, Hugh Walpole, and John Galsworthy. We have no such quintet over here, but we can take comfort in the fact that they are writing in the same language and enriching it.

There is much in “Young Felix” which recalls the earlier “Nocturne”, and yet I believe this is even finer. It has the same lovely quiet, but there is added a treasure of irrepressible humor that outshines anything Swinnerton has ever done. As Mr. Wells says: “Seen through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens, more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity.”

D. G. W.

A poet’s first novel usually brings forth a sharply defined list of questions. Is it anything more than expression? Is it a poem in prose? Is it sincere? Always “Is it sincere?” With Elinor Wylie none of these are permissable. She sub-titles her story, “A Sedate Extravaganza”, and that is just what it is—a burlesque on the latter eighteenth century. Its step-sister, “Nets to Catch the Wind”, shows its relationship only in the rare delicacy common to both and unsurpassed—even by Walter de la Mare. “Jennifer Lorn” is whimsical, satiric—at times reminiscent of Max Beerbohm in his early essays and yet far more like Jane Austen. It is a far cry from Beerbohm to Austen and yet in this story we have the union. There is the common outcry against willy-nilly women who swoon upon the slightest provocation; women who tremble before their lord and master, languishing beside their smelling salts.

This is the story of an aristocrat and his bride who voyage East for the East India Company only to find disaster, discontent, and disillusionment. Jennifer is dainty—and feminine. Gerald is dazzling—and masculine. True caricatures of their time, sketched by the hand of a most extraordinary stylist, it is delicate, diminutive, and diabolically clever—just what a poet like Miss Wylie should do.

D. G. W.

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