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WITH the publication of The Lepers, the series dealing with the novelist Costals and his relations with women is completed. Monsieur de Montherlant is an important writer. He is intellectually exhilarating. He compels one's interest and

attention. He is extremely original. He throws out numbers of acute and penetrating observations. The attacks he makes need making and he delivers them with boldness and skill.

Yet he seems to me to provide no sustaining nourishment and curiously little illumination ; the influence he exerts, though sharp, is short-lived. No doubt this is partly due to one's instinctive resistance to disagreeable aggressive characters, insisters on uncomfortable truths. One is aware of Monsieur de Montherlant as an author of inflexible principle, painfully, religiously determined neither to compromise, sup- press nor extenuate in the task he has undertaken. But there is in him a fundamental thinness, a touch, like frost, of the failure of the too-clever in human experience and emotional creativeness ; and the conviction grows on one that his hero is a charlatan: that is, in the last analysis, a bore.

On the credit side he has two excellent qualities : he works very hard and he enjoys himself very much. He is also a vigorous debunker ; but he substitutes nothing for his debunking except a sexual cult of himself as dreary and

retrograde as the Nazi philosophy of blood and soil. He is the male rampant, the male with the " beak of brass," the great sexual anarchist and superman. A phony Messiah, god- like connoisseur and benefactor of women ; a clown, a sort of Groucho Marx, madly, grotesquely on the prowl, lecherous, dis-

mayingly rude. He is weak ; he is vulgar ; totally materialistic ;

neurotically insolent, spiteful and brutal. Not an attrac- tive character ; and the author is at pains to withhold sympathy from him to the extent of making frequent intrusions in the role of impartial editor or mocking critic. On the other hand, he admires him sufficiently to identify him with the God of

Genesis and clothe a description of his literary labours in Biblical language. " And he wrote for twelve days, bubbling over with creative grossness and full of creative mirth. And what he had written was good," &c. In fact, in spite of all the track-covering and ambivalence, admiration appears to me to predominate.

Generally speaking, the aim of the work is to blow up the fortresses of bourgeois morality. Marriage is attacked, and the whole Western conception of sexual love and the Christian faith with its cult of suffering and the dignified position it confers upon woman. The deplorable consequences of pity, of " the terrible temptation to do good," are demonstrated. The only law to recognise is that of the needs and desires of the male nature. The inferiority of woman is insisted upon : woman vampirish and obstructive,

" for ever sickly, for ever impure," for ever unhappy. The whole of life is seen as a sexual battleground ; and the figure of Costals would seem to symbolise the destructiveness of the sexual force, the passion to scourge, corrupt, betray inherent in it, and the male resurrection from it. Ultimately the feminine principle is identified with disease, with death itself,

in the figure of the leprous prostitute whom Costal takes as a supreme test of himself and from whom he escapes, after a time of great fear, physically unscathed, emotionally enhanced and replenished. It would be interesting to take a survey of M. de Montherlant's public and discover the proportion of male to female readers ; also in what amounts gratitude, pleasure, sympathy, repulsion, resentment, indignation occur in each class. At least, indifference is impossible.

John Rodker is a brilliant translator. One is the more surprised by such occasional clumsiness as " It was stronger than he was " as a version, one presumes, of " C'etait plus fort que lui."

Two English novels ; smooth, bland, tepid and innocuous : invalid diet. Morning's at Seven appears to be a first novel, and were it not for the dedication to the author's wife, it would be impossiblt. to believe this is not a woman's novel. There is a feminine overflow of words, a Nursery World flavour about it, cosy, domestically bracing. There is also a dash of Mrs. Miniver, an equal complacency and looking on

the bright side, though not, of course, the classiness and culture. It is a mild, suffocating chronicle of middle-clas- family life, a year in the life of pleasant people : Mother, Father three children, a dog, a cat, a devoted Emily to serve the Master and Mistress (sic). There is also a grandfather clock which announces, " with a certain amount of pride," that it is dinner-time ; and a bathroom in which teeth are perpetually being brushed. A new car is bought and they all go for a spin and a child is sick. They visit Grannie on Sundays after church. They have a bridge evening, with refreshments. Father is induced to speculate by a crooked business pal and nearly loses his excellent position in a big grocery firm ; but all turns out well, and he takes Mother out to dine and dance in a new evening frock. It is all absolutely sincere, decent and wholesome : a photograph of a particular section of the suburban middle-class, a tiny sealed-up world, unrelated to any world outside, above or below it, bent only upon pre- serving its own status quo. From beginning to end of this lengthy novel not a whisper from or a question to history, not a quiver of worry. Yet even these people, so comfortable and confident, must be on the move now. In what direction?

The Spinning Wheel is en innocently voluptuous romance of highish life. Miss du Maurier makes an attempt to relate her characters to historical events, but the book remains a tea- shop daydream. The heroine is first encountered in Vienna, where, with emeralds in her hair, looking like Love-in-a-mist, light as thistledown, she dances her way into the heart of the Laird of Donain. Widowed in the last war, her second marriage is to a German professor, who drowns himself to set her free when it looks like war that time in 1938. The last episode introduces a young painter of twenty with second sight. Water-colour landscapes are really his line, " Russell Flint sort of thing, only naturally I don't pretend to be in his class " ; but in spite of this he does a portrait of her which turns out not what she is, a lady going, on for fifty, but a reproduction accurate in every detail of a long-lost portrait of her as a young girl. After this mystic proof of their mutual destiny they have a passionate honeymoon in Italy. But the present war breaks out. He reveals that he is in the Intelligence. The boat upon which he embarks with her to fulfil a secret mission is torpedoed. " Together always,' they whispered before the full force of the sea took them to her."

Native Son is an extremely remarkable and impressive novel : one of those rare books which must have immense social repercussions in the country of their origin. It is such an unusual experience to find the force and level of imaginative power and sympathy sustained in a long novel from first word to last, that one finds oneself wishing yet fearing to use words such as " masterpiece," which have become debased coinage to describe it. Some will call it sentimental propaganda ; but to me the scope and passionate sincerity of this book give it a grandeur, a moral importance at least as great as that of An American Tragedy. It is charged with emotion until it becomes incandescent. It is a dramatic story of crime and punishment —the murder of a white girl by a young Negro. But it is far more than this. It is an exhaustive analysis of the structure and taboos of a society which makes such crimes not only possible but inevitable. An intelligent Negro boy of lowest social position, open to all the stimuli of modem American life, yet debarred by race from access to them on terms of equality, becomes by accident—yet inevitably—a murderer, and thereby for the first time in his life discovers a possible meaning and order in his relations with other people. The sense is overpowering, .. and repeatedly driven home, that he is the victim, that it is to him that wrong has been done ; and nothing is more admirable artistically than the selection of " good " or beneficent members of the enemy class to receive his blow. The girl sympathises with the Negro cause ; the parents give bountifully to Negro charities. Their approach to him causes him the final terror that explodes the catastrophe. At the end, when the hunt has closed in and all hope is over, he finds a friend in a white man—his Communist Jewish lawyer—and is enabled to understand himself and to free himself from guilt and fear. It is a measure of Mr. Wright's power that we believe pro- foundly in this final spiritual catharsis and integration. Indeed he has created in the degraded brutalised Bigger Thomas figure of of sublime dimensions ; one who inspires the kind of love and pity we bestow upon the tragic hero.

ROSAMOND LEHMANN.