Fiction
A NEW book by Edith Wharton is always an event, for she is seriously and graciously an English as well as an American novelist. If Henry James taught her much, the strong, rich texture of her art is woven from divinations all her own. With irony, compassion, and pellucid style she compels her highly individualized characters towards the springe of a situation that will reveal them naked, and suffering, and at odds with destiny. So in such books as Ethan Frame and The House of Mirth. Now, in Twilight Sleep, her penetrating vision dwells like an ultra-violet ray on a group of people that refuse even to imagine that they may be ever naked, and suffering, and at odds with destiny. The title of her book is a stigma branded on those who hide from pain behind a hard bright optimism, and narcotize their minds with pseudo- philosophies that dishonour the East. Pauline Manford is one of those wealthy women whose vain and dizzy days of futile activity are soothed by massage and Mahatmas. Round her, the various figures of her family move dissatisfied, yet sigh and refuse decisions. Of course the scenes of artificial social life are brilliantly done ; and all these modern caitiffs are conducted with closing implications and gradual innuendoes to the dread moment of ignominy from which Nona the candid saves them—only for more self-delusion, one thinks. But for once the material is not good enough for Mrs. VVharton's elaborate art. The book is too much a tranche de vie, and of a life so muffled and atrophied by wealth that it is too dense for her delicate inevitable entanglements. Still, being Edith Wharton's, this is, of course, a notable indictment.
How the Old Woman Cot Home is frankly a fantastical tale for fantastical minds. M. P. Shiel is known to the connois- seurs of strange literary flavours. In books like the Purple Cloud, with its De Quinceyish climaxes of doom, and Shapes in the Fire, where amazing castles are found in the folds of the hills that divide history from fable, he is macabre as Poe, recondite as Baron Corvo, sophisticate as Baudelaire- gives you un nouveau frisson, in short. But he also writes merely " sensational " stories. This is a sensational story, though told more or less in his fantastical dialect. Though it passes chiefly in London, it is full of flights, caprices, trans- formations, irrelevances, mad coincidences—and flights again, always flights, like a feverish dream. The people also are dreamlike, very vivid but hardly lifelike. The hero should be gagged, for he is much too -theoretical about the universe. But there are moments of poignant beauty ; and when one is most exasperated by some ribald folly of style, the next sentence will offer you a simile as rich as old ambergris, or pure as a cup of water from Elysium. Let only those who..
have a taste for the grotesque, the startling, the wilful, the bizarre, read this rushing extravaganza.: SUch, being patient, will have some surprise's of beauty by the way.
RACHEL A-NNAND TAYLOR.
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