STAR OF MERCIA.* PROBABLY there is no more difficult branch
of the art of fiction than the writing of " historical tales." What shall be the author's point of view ? Shall he appeal to the reader through the patently imaginative romanticism of a Scott, with its feet in Wardour Street and its head among the Homeric Cycle ; or the subtler romanticism of the so-called realistic method, which sets everything to the psychological key the author thinks to be distinctive of his period—with its feet making a great flutter among the denizens of Pook's Hill and its head behaving quite a-morally among Salammba's Carthaginians! Or shall he try to work through the simple artistic intoxication of Pure Fiction—with its head, feet, and whole person set within the compass of Herodotus ? There cannot be the least doubt • Star of Afercia. By Blanche Devercux. With an Introduction by Ernest Rhys. Loudon : Jonathan Cape. [6s. =CI
that of these three the most difficult of attainment is the last, the universal method. Miss Devereux has attempted a blend of all three ; there is therefore every excuse for her failure. It seems that her original impulse springs from the last ; she is delighted with some twist of legend, some unusually vivid passage in a chronicler, and attempts to make Pure Story of it. From this point of view it is only right that her impressions of human nature should be of the broadest and simplest, even the crudest, kind. But neither can she nor will she leave it at that. In the story which gives its title to the book, the story of a murdered lover, she allows a sentimental romanticism to colour a theme which should be treated with either the very starkest and subtlest austerity or else a careful and cumulative dramatic intensity. In the tale of Gwrtheyrn the Drunkard it is this same quality of hardness which is lacking. And yet the tales are not easy reading either ; the situations creak somewhat, and the periodless archaism of the language used is distinctly trying.
These are hard words, but they arc not meant as an imper- tinence. Miss Devereux has laid herself open to them by the very difficulty of the task she has attempted, which makes it necessary for the reviewer to treat her seriously. And however much he may cavil at her method of presentation, lie must admit that her book is full of singularly interesting material, and that it is generally quite impossible for him to detect how much of it is from the common store of legend and chronicle, how much of it her own peculiar creation. " And she has this peculiarity," that although the curious apathy of her style prevents her producing any very vivid effect in the mind of the reader at the time of reading, her stories acquire a gradual clarity in the memory, where, indeed, they remain very firmly rooted.
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