A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

FOUR TALES BY ZELIDE [COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE New York Times.]

Four Tales by Zelide. Translated by Sybil Scott, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Scott. (Constable. 12s.) - MR. GEOFFREY Scow, put us all under a debt of gratitude by his discovery for English readers of Zelide and by his study of the mind and character of that memorable woman, one, who, though original in so many ways, was also typical of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Now Lady Sybil Scott does us and Zelide another great service by her translation of the four best of Zelide's stories. Without the opportunity to study these adventures in fiction one cannot wholly realize the workings of the mind of this melancholic, and yet philosophic, almost Stoic prisoner, first of a Dutch and then of an Helvetian chateau.

Here is the tragedy of a woman born to charm and rule both those who rule men's hearts and brains in literature and those who control their bodily actions in the State. Wide was born to carry out and develop what Gibbon called " the perfection of that inestimable art which softens and refines our social intercourse." Yet she was condemned by Fate and her own strange soul to waste her wisdom, her kindness, her intellectual beneficence and fascination in a milieu, rural, petty and decadent. She lived almost entirely among people incapable of understanding and appreciating an intellect of a high order, lodged in the body of a beautiful and sympathetic woman. She was a bird of paradise caged in a dim and dusty backyard. It was part of the tragedy that &tide could never bring herself to give her heart its rights by force majeure. She had the fatal gift of acquiescence, of refusing to fight with Fate. In her sad serenity of soul she let herself be the victim of circumstance almost without a struggle. It never seems to have occurred to her to play Ajax and defy the lightning, or to say ".We are the sport of Circumstances : Then Let circumstances be the sport of men."

Though not content with life, she was silent and waited to see the future come. Her volition was paralysed even in her own special realiii of thought There was no striving, no contention, hardly a heart-cry. She sat resigned in her chair like a figure of ice, till death one day saw that his work was already done and that it was time to obliterate what had once been so noble an image. All this we understand the better for, reading Zelide's own stories. Mr. Geoffrey Scott brought her back to life for a moment like the adept in Poe's study of the mesmerizing of a dying man. Lady Sybil's translation Of her Four Tales Shows us how, even when Wide was alive, her soul's atrophy was nearly complete.

Let me say that Lady Sybil' s translation is far more than a mere rendering from one language to another. It par- takes of the nature of an interpretation, as, indeed, every good translation should. It puts us en rapport with the way of existence pursued by the unhappy, yet kindly, gracious author of " Caliste." While she fascinates, she is intolerable. She makes us at one and the same moment want to bless her and worship her as a goddess, and to call her " the damnedst fool in all creation."

Mr. Scott in his exquisite miniature of Zelide, which he coldly calls- an " Introduction," is, I feel, hardly generous enough in his praise of the four tales, though praise he does, and very highly. Though he admits that Miss Austen herself would not have disdained many of the touches in these stories, he does not seem as much attracted or moved as one would have expected by the tender melancholy Emil pathos-of the narration. Even judged only by themselves, the stories' hearts still beat. If-- considered in relation -to the author's own life and 'character, they:have an overwhelming poignancy.

Whether the Mother in the ".Letters' froin Lausanne " Or the daughter--each is a; self-portrait of the author, one. of here youth, and one of her middle age—is the better presented, it would be hard to say. Both are alive and both give true readings .from the Book of Life. It is; however, in the second section of the Lausanne letters that Zelide's powers of narration and characterizatiOn burn clearest. This is in truth a new tale, though it is inter- polated into the tale set forth in the first portion of the " Letters from Lausanne." It is the story of his life told by the relative and " Governor " of a young F.nglish lord who is making the Grand Tour. The young lord is one-- of the chief characters in the "overheard " story. The sub- title of the tale within a tale is " Caliste," the scene is laid in England, and all the characters are English.

" Caliste " is altogether admirable as a piece of fiction— full of feeling and intensely human. Nor is it less memorable because we see both in the man and in the woman strong traces of Zelide's own personality. In the other characters there are suggestions of members of the novelist's family. Zelide and the persons of her home drama thus act and react upon each other and on the reader throughout the story. I shall not attempt to summarize this tale of one who may be called a demi-mondaine in spite of herself—" a daughter of joy," who was at the same time one of Nature's saints. I want, however, to give the readers of the Spectator a taste of Zelide's quality—partly to make them read the book itself and so gain much that will please them—if also a good deal of heartache—and partly to justify what I have said in praise of the book. The following passage describes the narrator's first meeting with Caliste

One day at Bath I was seated on one of the seats upon the promenade, sometimes turning the pages of a book that I had brought with me, sometimes letting it lie idle beside-me. A lady' whom I remembered to have seen before came and seated herself at the other end of the bench : we remained long without speaking, I scarcely observing her ; at length I turned my eyes towards her and answered some questions that she put me in her low and modest voice. I thought it was only through motives of politeness and gratitude that I escorted her to her home a few minutes later ; but the next day and the following days I sought to see her again and her gentle conversation and soft attentions caused me soon to prefer her company to my own sad reveries, which, until then, had been my only resource."

Here is something far beyond the tone and atmosphere of the ordinary eighteenth-century short or long story. We find the ethos of the story foreshadowed in miniature.

More charming and more direct is the picture of the mind and character of Caliste. It reads like an excerpt from Mr.. Geoffrey Scott's own account of Zelide. The narrator, it should be remembered, is an Englishman and is writing a letter to " Madam de C— " another facet of Zelide.

" She resembles you, madam, or she resembled you—I do not know which expression to employ ! In her thoughts, in her judg- ments, in her manners, she had, like you, a manner of passing over small considerations in order to go straight to the root of the matter,' to that which is really important in people and things. Her soul and her speech, her tone and her thought, were always in accord ; that which was only ingenious did not interest her, prudence in itself never determined her, and she said that she did not really know what reason was. But she grew ingenious in order to oblige others, and prudent to spare them distress, and she appeared to be reason itself when she desired to soften painful memories and to bring back calm

to a -tormented heart and mind. You, madam, are sometimes gay and often impulsive ; she was never either the one or the other:

Dependent, although adored, despised by some while she was served upon their knees by others, she had contracted a melancholy reserve that had something in it of both pride and fear. If she had been. less loving she might have appeared bashful and unapproachable. One day, on seeing her withdraw herself from some strangers who- had approached her with assiduity and were regarding her with admiration, I asked her what were her motives in acting thus. Let us go near them,' she said, ' they have enquired my name, you will see how they now will look at me ! ' We made the experi- ment ; she had divined only too truly, and a tear accompanied the smiling glance with which she made me observe it. - • ' What does it matter to you i ' I asked her. - • - One day it may matter to me,' she said, her colour rising. I only understood her a long time afterwards."

Surely I cannot be far wrong in regarding this admirable paisage as a new inheritance for -the lovers of good literature. And' it'Wes not Stand-alone. There are plenty more passages as good and as poignant in the four tales. For reflection what could be better than the sentence, " She 'hid contracted a melancholy reserve that had something in it both of pride and fear " ? 'e'en toute la Mids.

J. S. LOE. STRACHEy,