14 JULY 1928, Page 24

Fiction

Vasco. By Marc Chadourne. Translated by Eric Sutton. Pre- Lest Ye Die. By Cicely Hamilton. (Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.) Eddy and Edouard. By the Baroness von Hutten. (Hutchinson. 7s. 6d.) Mn. H. E. BATES is already recognized as an artist ; and, if the reader should find Day's End a little devitalizing, it is because he deliberately confines himself to muted chords, and the tragedies of the inarticulate and inhibited. At their best his stories are adroit seizures of the quality, usually the despairing quality, that resides in a critical hour when nothing really happens ; at their ldndest they are like the long sigh that sometimes comes before settling to sleep ; at their cruellest they convey the qualm of that pity which is not without contempt. His subdued method is not always effective. The name-story is too long, and its relentless details are merely depressing ; while the anecdote of " The Schoolmistress " is over-subtilized into futility. He has, indeed, arrested transient and dreamlike impressions with a touch of aching beauty in " The Birthday," " Spring Song," " The Dove," and " Harvest." But, on the whole, we are left with a sense of impotent and almost imbecile creatures lapsing into paralysis in an unnaturally ominous world, and an inclination to accuse Mr. Bates of a wilful sadness. He sometimes forces his effect with unnecessary ugliness. " The train ran out to be besieged like a corpse by vermin " is not an inevitable comparison.

The stories told at The Runagates Club, the chief members of which are already familiar to Colonel Buchan's readers, are naturally of a more objective kind. Told by and to a company of secure and slightly Philistine friends during after-dinner ease and leisure, the adventures are naturally tempered by the prevailing mood. It may be that some of the ghostlier tales, like " The Wind in the Portico " and " Skule Skerry," might have been carried to a more acute point had they stood alone; But Colonel Buchan is frankly not on his more serious plane in this pleasant volume. His intention is to divert ; and in such episodes of humour and queerness as " The Frying Pan and the Fire," " Divus Johnston," and the gently malicious " Fullcircle," he admir- ably succeeds.

The Vasco of M. Chadourne snatches us away to worlds of terror and pride, to tread the kurnin' g marl and to realize the agony of the " Generation Perdue " of the young men to whom the Armistice could not give the peace for which they were for ever spoiled. Mr. Ford Madox Ford's intro- duction is suggestive, though the parallel with Galleons Reach will not commend itself to many. Vasco is a passionate individualist, the child of conflicting parents, who has fed his spirit with the mysterious music of Mallane.i, and the intolerant aspiration of Nietzsche. He refuses the poplars and quiet acres of his heritage, desiring to recover his soul " naked as Adam, on 'some seashore 'at the o$ler end of the world." So he sails to the Pacific Isles ; and whoever reads of his hallucinated days in Papeete, Tautira and Nouhiva will realize the great trees, the burning flowers, the luminosity, the heavy fragrance, and the soft corruption of this dubious Paradise him a personal experience. He finds a companion, the " desperate " Plessis, who, seeming to be the superman that Vasco cannot make himself, plays a strange part in his psychological drama. This is a strildng example of the disintegrating kind of novel ; and the translator has finely preserved the limpid and passionate beauty of the style.

The translator of The Way of Sacrifice has hardly been so fortunate. Evidently his author is occasionally incoherent ;

but the English rendering is of a bewildering literalness, Written before Verdun, this book caused Fritz von Unruh to be pronounced insane. It is hard to believe, as the cover states, that it was secretly read in the German ranks, merely because of the evident difficulty of the style, which is partly very modernist, partly sentimental in the old German Romantic Revival manner. The conversations are impossibly theatrical. The horror and disgust of modern warfare seem to be revealed as in segments, circles, fragments, broken and distorted by the hectic and grotesque characters of the company described. Doubtless the book has its place in the dossier of war-literature ; but it sounds as if written in a brilliant hysteria.

Lest Ye Die is Miss Cicely Hamilton's revision and enlarge- ment of a novel issued as Theodore Savage. It is a prophecy of the disappearance of civilization in a final war, and of the human lapse into primitive conditions. It is a forcible and earnest piece of writing. Still, like all books concerning the future, it fails to convince.

After three exacerbating books, Eddy and Edouard seems positively emollient. The Baroness von Hutten presents a fragile boy, who, born in America, belongs on his mother's side to a great French family. His determined grandmother reared Edouard as a French gentleman. Judge Forbes and other citizens of Perry saw to it that Eddy did not forget his American citizenship. After the death of his grand- mother, the Eddy part of him prevailed ; and not till he was fifty did he let himself be drawn to Europe, where, of course, he finally encountered his French relatives. Yet he ended by acquiring the family castle in Savoy, and marrying a cousin, though not quite as he intended. The conflict, or rather the alliance, of Eddy and Edouard is thoroughly amusing. This is a rambling, leisurely novel thronged with loquacious and kindly people ; and, when we leave Eddy- Edouard in a fit of mirth at his own expense, we have become quite attached to him.

RACHEL ANNAND TA.YLDE. •