DESERT CACTUS
By Julie Heyneman This biography of the American sculptor Arthur Rackham (Geoffrey Bles, 10s. 6d.) moves with an undercurrent of tragedy independent of the author's processes of telling. The subject, hitherto little known this side of the world, deserves psychological investigation, for the reason that in him America possessed one of her few major artists, and one of her most enigmatical personalities. The trend of his life, from the day on which he strode into a San Francisco academy of drawing and shocked the students with the terrific intensity of his limning, up to the miserable decline of his mind under mental stresses, exemplifies with distressing emphasis the frustration from which American art appears always to be suffering. Of the manner in which the biography is com- piled and elucidated, little more need be said than that wherever possible Rackham's own letters have been intro- duced—a completely praiseworthy step, as these letter.; exhibit almost as vividly as his sculpture the phenomenal energy innate in the man. Without education, or the meagrest similitude of " culture," he forced into whatever medium came immediately to his hand—clay, stone, words, or the opportunities of being—a terrific spontaneous virility reminiscent of his major compatriot, John Brown.
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