In more than one respect Mr. Calderon's strange fantasy invites
comparison with that of Mr. Chesterton recently noticed in these columns. We find the same difficulty in extracting a moral, lesson, or meaning; the same alternation of moments of intense seriousness with moments of riotous farce ; the same ironic contrast between the futility of indi- vidual effort and cosmic indifference. Mr. Calderon's night- mare, however, suffers from the added drawback that while his monster-hero is far too incredible to excite the companion he is intended to provoke, none of the other characters possesses any claim to sympathy or respect. There are some excellent episodes and clever caricatures of various social and political types, but when it is impossible for the reader to tell whether he is meant to laugh or cry, he ends by doing neither. Mr. Calderon's method is too sketchy to be impreseive, his satire too anarchical to be convincing. One rises from the perusal of Dwa/a bewildered and dismayed by the misdirected expenditure of so much talent on the working out of a fantastic plot on lines which nothing short of genius could render engrossing.
Hriat the Hittite. By Dolt Wyllarde. (W. Heinemann. 65.)— No one can fairly complain of being surprised into reading a dis- agreeable novel if he deliberately opens a work called Deka the Hittite. In this book Mr. Wyllarde treats a motive which is as old as the time of David in a powerful manner. It must he confessed, however, that there is an extra spice of treachery about the conduct of Evelyn Gregory, the Administrator of Key Island, for in sending his private secretary, Captain Lewis, into a post of responsibility and danger for which he is unfit Gregory betrays not only his secretary but his country. The whole story is a tangle of illicit love affairs, and gives an anything but pleasant picture of the results of forced inactivity on a small self-contained society. But there is, fortunately, no one in the book who has the slightest pretence to attractiveness, so the reader can watch the different characters being overtaken by the Nemesis of their sins without feeling any great distress at their misfortunes.
The Island Pharisees, By John Galsworthy. (W. Heinemann. 13s.)—The hero of this book is a man who takes so jaundiced a view of life that he cannot believe in the bona fides of the ex- cellent commonplace people with whom he comes in contact, but accuses them all of being hypocrites. They are not hypocrites, being merely bores of a rather pronounced type, but their rational everyday behaviour is quite a relief to the reader after the magnificent but nebulous theories of life entertained by the hero, Mr. Richard Shelton. The interest of the story lies in the character-drawing, and it must be owned that the characters stand out distinctly in the picture, even when they are not true to real life. Most readers will probably feel much sympathy with Antonia, the heroine, for wishing to break off her engagement with Mr. Shelton, who describes himself (only in his own reflections, however) as "a man capable of sentiment, of rebellious sympathies, of a sort of untidiness of principle." It is obvious from this extract that the speaker had another intolerable faalt,—a complete absence of the sense of humour
CURRENT LITERATURE.
STANFORD'S LONDON ATLAS.
Stanford's London Atlas of Universal Geography. Third Edition. (E. Stanford. 12 guineas.)—A visitor from another planet, say a Martian snatching a holiday from his labour of irrigation, would not find anywhere an atlas of the earth that should altogether satisfy him. To a person so detached from all local interests every KR. CALDERON, whose adventures in fiction have hitherto been chiefly in the nature of joyous and irresponsible extravaganzas, plunges in the volume before us into the deeper and more dangerous waters of tmgi-comedy. In regard to the main- spring of the plot—the introduction of the Miming Link into the very heart of a sophisticated civilisation—Mr. Calderon has been forestalled by more than one writer (notably by Peacock), but his treatment of the situation is so entirely original that it is unnecessary to insist on superficial resemblances. If the theme be old, there is so much novelty in his variations that Mr. Calderon has no need to cry a plague on those qui nostra ante see discreet. More than that, lie is under no obligations to the contemporary author who beyond all others is given to delineating the impact on our social structure of some granite at arnispieuuin mon- struin,—Mr. H. G. Wells. Of the coldly circumstantial methods of the Sage of Sandgate there is not a trace in the volume before us. Mr. Calderon's drafts on the credulity of the reader are not confined to his premises, but extend right up to the final catastrophe. Even at the outset his Missing Link is endowed with articulate human speech, and once removed from his primeval forest, adapts himself to his new surround- ings with astonishing rapidity. The gap of thousands, possibly millions, of years is bridged in a few months, and with lightning rapidity the savage passes through the phases of social lion, man of fashion, politician, and Premier. This frank disregard of the canons of probability affords a clue to the author's main aim. He has obviously no intention, as Mr. Wells has in his stories starting from a somewhat similar "take-off," to exhibit the disintegrating effect on society of a wholly new and unparalleled phenomenon. He has, unless we entirely misread his meaning, availed himself of a fantastic apparatus —a pithecus en mac/rind—to illustrate the slenderness of the barrier that divides the primitive man from the most elaborate product of civilisation. Thus he chooses to represent his promoted ape as finding his trim and only affinity in a certain Lady Wyse, "the fine flower of all that is most artificial and decadent in England." Their meeting at a fashionable evening party is likened to that of two augurs ;— Oh, you're the Black Prince,' said Lady Wyse, 'the Wild Man from Borneo that everybody talks about P Lady Lillie.° quailed, and vanished through the floor. Howland-Bowser looked round the room, chin up, and walked off with the air of an arch- demon at a school-treat. 'Mow delightful!' pursued the insolent lady alowly. 'Of course you are a Mabommedan, and carry little fetishes about with you, and all that.' Her eyes were directed vaguely at his shirt-studs. Looking down from above he saw only the lids of them, long-lashed and iris-edged, convoked by the eye- balls, like two delicate blue-veined eggs. She raised them at last, and he looked into them. It was like looking out to sea. She looked into his and it was as if a broad sheet of water had passed swiftly through the forest of her mind, and all the withering thickets, touched by the magic flood, had reared their heads, put forth green leaves, blossomed, and filled with joy-drunk birds, singing full-throated contempt and hatred of mankind. The energy to hate, seared with the long drought of loneliness, was quickened and renewed by this vision of a kindred spirit. For she too was a monster. Not a monster created, like Dwala, at one wave of the wand by Nature in the woods; but hewn from the living rock by a thousand hands of men, slowly chipped and chiselled and polished and refined till it reached perfection. Every meanness, every flattery that touched her bad gone to her moulding ; till now she was finished, blow-hardened, un- malleable ; the multiplied strokes slid off without a trace. Her position was known to all ; there was no secret about it. The great blow that had severed the rough shape from the mass was struck, as it were, before the face of all the world. They might have taken her and tumbled her down the mountain side, to roll ingloriously into the engulfing sea. Instead of that they had set herons pedestal, carved her with their infamous tools, fawned round her, swinging Lilliputian censers, seeking favour, and singing praise. She was a monster, and no one knew it. And now at last she had met an equal mind her eyes met other eyes that saw the world as she saw it—whole and naked at a glance. There was no question of love between them ; they met in frozen
• Dank. By George Calderon. Loudon: amith, Elder. end Co. [Se, ed.]
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