FICTION.
THE DRAGON IN SHALLOW WATERS.•
Miss SACKVILLE- WEST'S new book is somewhat crudely, perhaps somewhat self-consciously, remarkable. It is about a small manufacturing town of the North-East of England, lying in fiat fen country and dominated by its Norman Abbey and a giant soap factory. Its chief characters are two malformed brothers, the one deaf and dumb, the other blind. It is the latter, Silas Dene, who is the chief character of the story, and it is on the delineation of his character by the events recorded that Miss Sackville-West relies for her central interest•. If we have said that the book is crudely remarkable, let us confess unreservedly that it is remarkable. The represen. tation of the mind of this maimed Titan of a man was a subject exactly suited to the author of Heritage. It has given her scope for that odd gift which she obviously possesses to the full, but which all her critics have found so difficult to define, that curious characteristic of her books by which all her charac- ters seem to stand out in the highest relief from their back- grounds. Her novels are like early Italian pictures—there is no middle distance. In this case, of course, the background is most carefully painted, and great stress is laid on it, but yet it seems strangely separate from the characters who stand up sharp, vivid, and indeed often naked against it, but not in it. They are an interesting, well-drawn set, each as clear-cut and definite an impression of a human mind as we could wish for. Silas Dene; Nan, his charming and pathetic sister-in-law; Linnet Morgan, the attractive chemist of scents; Calthorpe, the lifelike overseer, and, lastly, the almost too vivid Lady Malleson. One cannot help feeling that Miss Sackville-West sees us all like this as sharp, clear-edged personalities, standing nakedly silhou- etted against our backgrounds. But we must justify our original contention that the book has an element of crudity. It was, we suppose, Miss Sackville-West's object to show the terrific and futile battlings of a great personality like Silas Dene against the cast-iron barrier of his environment. He was indeed to be the blind mind striking out wildly in the cruel game of blind man's buff while he had to play with circumstance. Was it not, then, rather unnecessary and excessive to make him physically blind ? Poor Silas and his type, in every walk of life, are mentally blind enough, we should have supposed, to make it unnecessary to put out his eyes to point the moral. But the book is not all about Silas. The wonderful, instinctive love of such women as Nan is again shown us as it was in Heritage. And who that reads the book will forget the great fight between Silas and Gregory in the last chapter ? After all, this is a crude world.
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