Green Fire. By Fiona Macleod. (Archibald Constable and Co.)—This is
a remarkable, but rather disappointing, book by a writer who has attained high distinction as a leader in that movement in Scottish—though not exclusively Scottish—litera- ture known as the Celtic Renascence. The style of Miss Macleod shows, indeed, no sign of falling off. She is almost at her best in her descriptions of Nature. There is a certain amount of strain and stress, but there is also genuine storm in such a passage as this :—" Above the shore a ridge of tamarisk- fringed dune suspended, hanging there, dark and dishevelled, like a gigantic eyebrow on the forehead of a sombre and mysterious being. Beyond this, again, lay a stretch of barren moor, caught and clasped a mile away by a dark belt of pines, amid which the incessant volume of the wind passed with a shrill whistling. Farther in among the trees were oases of a solemn silence, filled only at intervals with a single flute-like wind. eddy falling there as the song of a child lost and baffled in a waste place. Over and above the noise of the sea was a hoarse cry thridding it as a flying shuttle in a gigantic loom. This was the wind which continuously swept from wave to wave, shrewd, salt, bitter with the sterile breath of the wilderness whereon it roamed, crying and moaning, baying, howling, insatiate." Though this may pass, overdone as it is, the same cannot be said of Miss Macleod's strange, incoherent, and rhapsodical story of Celtic France and Celtic Scotland, of love and feudalism, of Alan and Ynis, of Judik Kerbastiou and Annaik de Kenyal. There is in it, no doubt, the raw material of a good story of passion such as Mr. Hall Caine might work up. But it would be giving encouragement of the wrong sort to a writer of considerable achievement and greater promise to say that Green Fire, in spite of "The Birds of Angus Ogue," and "The Herdsman," and "The Beauty of the Wold," is anything but a brilliant, though romantic, failure. "The green fire of life" is worth bringing from the clouds, but its burning in this book is too suggestive of the trans- pontine drama.
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