The Goddess of the Dandelions. By Lining Wassermann. (Ward and
Downey.)—Though this novel is very slight and not particularly well written, we have an impression that we might have found it pleasantly entertaining had we read it ten years ago ; but to read it now gives one an uncomfortable Rip Van Winkleish sort of feeling. Nothing is shorter-lived than a fashionable craze ; no occupation is less exhilarating than the flogging of a dead horse ; and in 1895 a story which is mainly a satire of the earliest stage of the " assthetic " movement, seems a book which has altogether lost its way and wandered into a world in which it is a perfect stanger. True, one or two of Miss Wassermann's types have survived into present decade. We are not quite unfamiliar with the poet Potter and his " strain after the cultivated licentiousness of life," who nevertheless could not "prevent himself from looking just what he was, an exceedingly intelligent, conventional, respectable, well-principled young man," and several other touches remind us that Miss Wassermann is happily still a living novelist ; but the main substance of the book is terribly out of date. Indeed, there is one respect in which The Goddess of the Dandelions is untrue, even to the transient travesty of life which it depicts. The Dandelion Club is established in a small provincial town, and nothing is more certain than that the earliest " anitheticism " was simply a West London fad which never had any hold on the provinces. The Dandelion poseurs are neither very interesting nor very credible ; but Miss Wassermann has given something of life to the disreputable father of the " goddess," who induces his daughter to accept a man whom she does not love, by a lying confession of disgraceful fraud and the melodramatie display of a revolver. That there are many poorer, less amusing books than The Goddess of the Dandelions we are quiet free to admit. What we contend is, that it has neither the sparkle nor the up- to-dateness essential to the success of a social satire.
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