FICTION
_ A TOY FOR GROWN-UPS
These Mortals. By Margaret Irwin. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d. net.) MELUSINE, the daughter of an Enchanter, grows tired of fairies as companions and wishes to see the world of mortals. So one night she sails up the moonpath over the sea in a boat • made out of a shell and a rose petal and a silver pin, and - arrives in all her fairy beauty and innocence at an Imperial Court remarkably like the world of to-day.
There her magic powers only add to the embarrassments caused by her simplicity. The Empress patronizes, the . Emperor ignores her, the Princess regards her as outrde and an outsider ; her ability to slip up and down moonbeams lands her in compromising situations, and all her spells cannot charm the Prince as does the magic of his own voice when he tells what happened in his last round of golf.
Among these strangers of her own race she has three com-
panions from her father's palace—a snake, a raven, and a cat of 'commanding yet complacent personality. But she finds another mortal as lonely as herself, and that is a captive king. She glides through his dungeon grating on a moonbeam and visits him at first only in dreams, until one night when she sees that his eyes are open, looking at her. They love ; Melu- sine's magic beauty grows more human ; she becomes the fashion at Court, and the Prince therefore wishes to marry her. She escapes to the forest, and when next she comes to the town for news of her lover it is as a peasant girl with her baby in her arms. She finds that a wedding is in progress between the father of her baby and the Princess, to whom she had once carelessly given a spell which enabled her to conquer his heart. From this point the story is in accordance with the oldest fairy tales. There are vicissitudes and heartbreakings ; but the end is as we should best like it.
Miss Irwin has shown much courage in giving such a setting to a novel—as who should make toys for grown-ups. Of course, we know how often toys give as much pleasure to parents as to their children ; but this fairy story is not for children at all. The form indeed is lightest gossamer, but the substance is stern passion and romance. As one reads the story for the first time one keeps wondering why so much wit and wisdom should have been dressed in this necromantic garb : and one is often shocked by the incongruity of the magic and the human elements ; but never does one doubt the writer's serious purpose, and on looking through the book a second time so many delightful passages jump to the eyes that one wonders why the first reading provoked a feeling akin to dissatisfaction. Perhaps the cause of this is to be found in a certain lack of just balance between the supernatural and the natural, the former seeming at times almost intrusive. Siegfried only donned his Tarnhelm at critical moments. Miss Irwin's brain is so fertile in fantasy that it sometimes passes beyond her control ; nevertheless, there is a distinction about all she writes which is quite unmistakable. The personality of Melusine's Cat, in which the supernatural and the natural are beautifully balanced, the little story of the Court hunchback, and the episode of the hunted deer, who is transformed in the nick of time into a sea-gull, are all a sheer delight.
Miss Irwin has made a bold experiment, and she is justified, not so much by the success of the experiment itself as by the simple charm of her style and the confident touch that under- lies her treatment of the subject, whereby the strange vagaries of her fairy heroine are made to carry the same degree of conviction as the everyday doings of mere mortals. In this as in that fascinating ghost story, Still She Wished for Company, Miss Irwin has shown that she means to win her audience, not by pandering to fashionable taste, but exactly in her own way ; but we are not convinced that she was well advised in producing this book while she is still in the process of creating
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