BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
WE see at their brightest this week stars of the second magnitude. Mr. Aldous Huxley, from whom we have long ceased to demand masterpieces, gives us his good sophisticated best, a volume of short stories : Little Mexican (Chatto and Windus) seems more tranquil and assured than some of his earlier, jerky and rather withering volumes. Miss May Sinclair has written a "novel in unrhymed verse," The Dark Night (Cape), but no one need fear boredom ; it is not one of these eighty thousand word novels—ten thousand at most, I should guess. It seems, indeed, by its motion and atmosphere, to be in the same genre as Maud and to be called a novel by the publishers merely for lack of a more precise name. It is a narrative poem, free by its form from any necessity for decoration, but proceeding with a more continuous intensity than would be possible (or tolerable) in prose fiction.
The Hoga, rth Press has issued in book form a series of reminiscences, Some Early Impressions, that the late Sir Leslie Stephen- contributed to the: National Review in 1903. Another (and a stronger) collection of periodical writings is Mr. John Freeman's English Portraits and Essays (Hodder and Stoughton). Mr. Freeman has an ease and beauty of style that give him a high place among modern critics even though he makes no display of apparatus and never Wrestles bitterly with his subject. Messrs. Macmillan republish, in one volume, the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth.
An interesting new volume in the Home University Library (Williams and Norgate) is Professor E. W. Macbride's An Introduction to the Study of Heredity. There is a monstrous illustration, very chastening to the male sex, of specimens of the worm Bonellia : the female reaches a length of eighteen inches ; the male is a minute parasite attached to the female. We hope that the male has some intellectual compensation, but he looks a very characterless creature. Messrs. Dent send us an addition to their Library of Greek Thought, Mr. J. D. Denniston's Greek Literary Criticism.
Dr. Karl Friedrich Nowak publishes an account of The Collapse of Central Europe (Kegan Paul). M. Camille Flammarion again gathers a huge number of " evidences " for spiritualism in Haunted Houses (Fisher Unwin). The most magnificent book of the week is A History of Tennis, by E. B. Noel and J. 0. M. Clark (Oxford University Press).
TIIE LITERARY EDITOR.
Previous page
