FANTASY AND CHILDHOOD

Broomsticks. By Walter De la Mare. Designs by Bold. (Constable. 10s. 6d.)

Ix Broomsticks, Mr. De la Mare has written one of the best books of short stories that have appeared for many years. He has cast off the " Hath Doth " phraseology that has sometimes obscured his great qualities to the squeamish ; he is not weak, he is not sentimental, and except in one story he is not pretty.

These stories arc in all moods of fantasy, some with an Alice in Wonderland flavour, sonic with a taste of Jack the Giant Killer, some with a queer faint tang which might be mixed Brontë and Mill on the Floss, and might even be David

Copperfield. But the story which is, to the present writer's mind, the pride of the book, is like the terrifying Alice's Godmother, wholly and entirely Mr. De la Mare's own, a story the like of which never was written before.

" Maria Fly " is, like all the stories in the book, about a child, but like all pieces of art that approach perfection it has at once one clear unmistakable meaning and a thousand subflavours and applications.

The house in which the child suddenly, in a moment of revelation, sees the fly living to itself, is painted room by room like a Pieter de Hoogh, and lit with just such significant bril- liance. In the kitchen a hare is lying on the table. Its fur was as soft as wool, cinnamon and snow white." Another room is seen after her entranced identification with the fly.

" The roses were floating there, filled with their fragrance and beauty as a dewdrop is with light, the fishes on either side of the little clock seemed to be made of flames rather than of gilded plaster, there was a patch of sunshine, too, just an oblong patch resting on the carpet and part of a chair.. . ."

Upstairs an old gentleman is busy writing a sermon.

" I,' said Maria, edging a little into the room, I have just seen a fly! . . . in the droring-room." indeed i ' said the old gentle- man still peering over his gold spectacles. . . . 'How very kind of you to come and tell me.

" Maria was almost as little pleased by the old gentleman's politeness as she had been by the talk of the cook. ' Yes, she said, ' but this was not a nordinary fly. It was all by itself, and I looked at it.' " •

Maria tries to tell her experience in the sunny room --this sudden apprehension of the fly—to all the friendly people in the house. The reader is deeply concerned in her pilgrimage. In the end she is utterly dissatisfied and disappointed, though each one has responded to her in the most charming way. Yet the story ends on a note of exhilaration which rounds off its naturalism to perfection. The child has gone into the garden.

" Maria gave another deep sigh, and then looked round her, almost as if in hopes of somebody else to whom she might tell her secret tale—about the fly—about Maria fly. She paused7 -staring. And then, as if at a signal, she hopped down suddenly out of the arbour, almost as lightly as a thin legged bird herself, and was off, flying. over the emerald green grass into the burning delightful sunshine, without in the least knowing why or where to."

It has been impossible, of course, to give the reader more titan

the roughest idea of the story, impossible to produce its impres- - sion of strange sun-lit significance. It would have been neces- sary to quote its four or five thousand words in full, so perfect is its economy, and so delicate and complicated the sense which it holds.

" Visitors," the next story, though strange and exquisite, is not so perfect as the fly story. It, too, is concerned with as child, and the edges of consciousness. The story which gives its name to the book is conceived in a robust vein. It concerns a young Tom cat named Sam, who, though beautiful and beloved, yet took to bad ways, and in spite of his mistrtss's really heroic efforts to save and reclaim him, went literally to the devil. No more is seen of the witches than a footprint, no more heard than a swish outside the attic windows like the sound of swans' pinions. The sense of increasing unease in the lonely house, and at last of horror, and of the cat's

growing strangeness, is wonderfully conveyed—perhaps nowhere better than in the scene in which the other eats attack Sam and cast him out as accursed.

Mr. De In Mare should for ever have robbed the phrase " Poet's Prose " of its jeer. The English of these stories is as exquisitely finished as was that of The Midget, and much more flexible. Indeed, it is as translucent as Miss Austen's, while

not Turner, in the illustrations to Rogers' Italy, gives a greater sense of amplitude in a tiny compass. But here the sense is not of space only. One or two of the stories depend entirely onthe way in which the reader is made to realize the slow, soft passake of time. " Lucy " may well, in this respect alone,..be the despair of many a short story writer. Broomsticks, is a real addition to a genre in which English literature has bee4 unrivalled since the time of Spenser.