FICTION.

TWO NOVELS.*

Mu. DOUGLAS GOLDETNG with Mr. Hubert Nepean, and Miss Tsr. Bryher, have presented to the world two novels whose principal

feature will probably seem to the reader at first blush unusual

incoherence. The Solvent, which is a pacifist tract very thinly disguised, chiefly consists of week-ends and dinner parties among people who are like the minor characters in Colonel Repington's revelations. Like most pacifist tracts, it begs two important questions—(a) Who started the war with Germany 1 (1) When it was started, what course should Groat Britain have pursued Its main points are—(a) That tho war never should have started. (I) That whatever England ought to have done, whirl she did was wrong. Moreover, it is argued that had a group

of fishing politicians chosen, the war could have been ended at

any moment. We also are given glimpses of the wrongs of Ireland. All this sounds incredibly dull : indeed the book is

a little dull. However, it is made interesting to the student

of manners, if never quite to the reader of novels, by two very good portraits, bath of women. The first is of Mrs. Dempsey, a half-Spanish, hut-Irish "rebel," and the second of the quite charming wife of a posing, opportunist, yet half-honest politician who has risen to Cabinet rank. The authors' views on marriage seem to be vaguely revolutionary, but in what direction the reader does not feel quite clear.

Miss Bryher's book Development is a dissected specimen rather than a tract. The phrase must not suggest something desiccated, for this would not fit her book, which is a glowing (which the reader is not to interpret gushing) account of the childhood and girlhood of "Nancy," obviously the author. Nancy had a

mind rather like that of Miss Dorothy Richardson—i.e., she

was super-sensitive to visual and oral impressions. She travelled about the Mediterranean, among Sussex meadows or Egyptian

deserts hearing and smelling twice as many things as any ordinary

person. Alas l at the ago of about twelve the poor child was sent to school, and such a echool ! She was, further, not allowed to take up any preession. However, we are to have a second volume entitled Adventure, which sounds more promising. A continuation generally strikes the reviewer as something in the

nature of a throat, but Miss Bryher's autobiography is sufficiently

curious and sufficiently well-expressed to make us rather welcome a second helping. Hero is an example of Miss Bryher'a style :— " Much of the magical enthusiasm poetry was afterwards to kindle lived for her now in mere words, with association of

loveliness or heroic deed, the Carthaginian war, Agathokles and the burning of the ships, tho quarries of Syracuse ; or the name alone of a place, Concha del Oro, shell of gold, that brought the

sea to mingle with almond and with lemon blossom, Palermo

or Euryalus, now vivid with anemones. From earliest remem- brance certain phrases, names especially of places or of persons, were never free from an association of colour, fashioned of a tone, written in it ; and as she grow, this feeling developed, uneonsciously expanding until her whole vocabulary beeamo a palette of colours, luminous geld, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water, Ionian- blue she called it, coming later to Greece, and white, with all

the delicacy and fragileness of thin foam, or a heavier shimmer merging to the cream bloom of a rose petal. This, to her, was perfectly natural. She marvelled no one ever exclaimed, 'I love the gold of magical I ' or 'What a wonderful white Sicily is I This colour-audionco is typical of Nancy's sense-perception. Miss Bryher should read Miss Amy Lowell on polyphonic prose and should try her hand at this method of expression. She already knows how to be eloquent.