"Summer, 1917," were written before the War. The author says
that she had wanted to call the book Peace and Goodwill, but had been warned that, "so much having been talked about both during the War years, no one could stand their being mentioned now that the War was over without
having brought either." If we ask why a series of essays
dealing with various places in Italy, Germany, France, and England might have been entitled Peace and Goodwill, the following passage may supply the answer .— "Well, what I now want to say is as follows : the war brought home to me (with sundry weightier matters) that the Genius Loci, under whose invocation I have so often placed what at first sight might seem mere jottings of an idle wanderer, is, when you under- stand him, really the most decent, as he is the youngest and humblest, of the indwelling gods whom we make for ourselves. The genius of places exists not in the consistent, hence so often ruthless, Outer Reality, but in the human heart, as Milton puts it, upright and pure. , . . I venture to assert that the poor little Genius Loci is a truly moral godhead—indeed, one of the few who cannot be used to mask our evil, and often preposterous, passions. His worship requires, not merely boasts of, a disinterested interest in Men and Things."
These quiet, reflective, esoteric essays reveal in Vernon Lee,
as she wanders among the highways and by-ways of Europe, a rich measure of that-" disinterested interest," which is always highly individual and passionately loyal to its own vision. She is less concerned with actually describing places than in analysing the moods which they induce in her, and, if her sen-
sitive art is too introspective and elusive for the general reader's taste, it will commend itself to all who see life with the inner eye and who can appreciate a nervous, artistic prose.
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