FICTION.
EBONY AND IVORY.
Ebony and Ivory. By Llewellyn Powys. (Grant Richards. 6s.)
Tins is a most painful book. Even the author of The City of Dreadful Night made one exception in his profession of an otherwise universal pessimism ; implicitly he excluded himself, for it was by the faint glow of his own idealism that the City appeared dark and dreadful. Mr. Powys disclaims this immunity, either from modesty or exasperation not choosing to exalt himself above the other East African settlers, the white men who, by his account, offered what ghostly and bodily torment they could to the animals they encoun- tered and the natives they employed. A meaner, crueller, more contemptible existence it would be impossible to conceive. One likes to think that Mr. Powys' grievance against the universe and, in particular, against the conditions of tropical
life prejudiced his selection of aspects and events and twisted them into a pattern whose every curve is morally ignoble. For he writes as a stylist, deliberately, with Conradian echoes ; With a Conradian fierceness for the aloofness and intolerance
of the inanimate world and, for human beings, with a fierce- ness that is all his own.
In the second half of the book pure fiction tends to supplant reminiscence ; the seamy side of English village life is exhibited and a note of fantasy creeps in. To save her younger sister from starvation a girl, called on account of physical deformity "The Wryneck," steals a gipsy's neglected baby and bakes it in a pie. The dish afforded only temporary relief ; the girl was taken away and the sister, having nothing to eat, died. "The Wryneck " is a fair example of Mr. Po'wys' second method, the method which requires his readers to marvel rather than to believe. It would be more effective if it were not so nearly associated with every-day happenings that we cannot help substituting, on the score of probability, the asylum and the workhouse for Mr. Powys' more sensationa denouements. Even with this handicap, his style sometimes achieves effects of beauty and terror How chill" (he is musing on mortality and the impermanence of human things) "is the touch of such ideas to the mind of man How before meditations of this kind the stoutest hearts quail, giving vent to a sigh, such as I heard from my, father once when m this very place the village sexton had described to us a vault under our feet, a vault which held the bodies of three tall men, with heavy gold rings on their. fingers."
Mr. Powys is most successful when most Povian. His impressions of Africa, if founded on experience, should have been " ventilated" in the form of a pamphlet ; it was scarcely fair to use them as the raw material of an intensely sophisti- cated art.
L. P. HARTLEY.
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