The Great Cockney Tragedy. By Ernest Rhys. The Sketches by
Jack B. Yeats. (T. Fisher Unwin.)—According to Mr. King- lake, the Oriental regards the European as an unaccountable and uncomfortable work of God, " who may have been sent for some good purpose to be revealed hereafter." This is rather like our feeling about Mr. Ernest Rhys's Great Cockney Tragedy. It is an unaccount- able and uncomfortable work of literature, and is adorned with sketches by Mr. Jack B. Yeats which are still more uncomfortable, though not so unaccountable. Mr. Rhys has certainly succceeded in being impressive, though what he wants to impress on us is not quite clear. Probably it is not quite clear even to himself : to which circumstance we might attribute the strain of angry mockery in which this tragedy in six sonnets is composed. The intensity and completeness with which, in this small compass, the squalid life and dismal death of a Jewish tailor in the East End are set forth, speak strongly for Mr. Rhys's mastery of his craft; and when the tone of mockery breaks into that of passion, the verse gathers volume and music at once. Witness such lines as these:— "Poor hungry imp, whose starveling face showed well Your Royal line .ge, most high Israel ! "
"A sweater's cave Whose nine poor tailors barely made—a slave."
"The hour is midnight twelve, the clocks declare, A fashionable hour for Fate's commands, And now Fate plainly calls on Simon Sands."
Mr. Yeats is an artist whose name we have not met with before. He has tragic power, an individual style, and considerable grasp of character, but appears to lack invention. The scene in the sweater's cave, and the last scene, when Simon is about to fling himself into the river, might have been far more impressively treated if Mr. Yeats had set his figures in surroundings which were poetically appropriate to the action. But of the imaginative value of scenery and entourage Mr. Yeats has apparently no idea. He is clearly a young artist, however, and both from him and from Mr. Rhys we shall expect work of more importance in the future.
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