MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
LAST week I wrote a film and factual threnody upon the sorrows of publishers, and this week I find myself in the illogical position of having to congratulate Messrs. Macmillan upon publishing in two volumes a work of half a million words. However large may be their stock of paper, however vast their
resources, Messrs. Macmillan must have deliberated anxiously upon what to do with Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both the lamb and the falcon are above life-size ; the paws of the former straddle the universe like the limbs of the Great Bear, the wings of the latter stretch across the sky from south to north. Had Miss West been an ordinary author, Messrs.
Macmillan would assuredly have told her to cut her _book to a tenth of its present size. "You must understand," they would have said to her, "that in war-time people are not deeply interested in the Nemanya dynasty or in the legend of Kara George." Rebecca West is not an ordinary author ; she is one of the most gifted women of our age ; and into this story of her journey to Yugoslavia she has poured the essence of what she feels and knows and thinks. "Nothing in my life," she says, "has affected me more deeply than this journey through Yugoslavia." It may seem strange to some that a chance visit to Macedonia should have made so profound an impression on a woman of her talent and experience. Yet there comes a stage with all sincere people when they weary of their own intelligence and are saddened by the grim habit of denying values. They seek for something intense and different, which can unite. thought with feeling and render intelligence the guide rather than the critic of emotion. The puke of passion which throbs through the history of the Yugoslays comes as a contrast to our own lethargic palpitations. Miss West in Macedonia found the sinews of her soul grow hale. She has sought in this immense work to convey something of this experience to others. To shorten the book would have been to reduce the scale of that experience and thereby to diminish its revelation. Messrs. Macmillan having been offered a masterpiece, were justified in publishing it as it stood.
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