JAZZ AND JASPER. By William Gerhardt. (Duckworth. 7s. 6d.)—Should it
be called a novel, this brilliant and farcical fantasia which leaves the reader with a titillated brain and a sinking heart ? It is a masquerade of engaging and corrupt young creatures dancing about the figure of the "pelt Lord Ottercove, emperor of the Press • it is a zigzag vision of a vanishing world and one sole peak left hazardous in space ; it is the funeral march of marionettes ; it is wild caricature and inward weeping ; it is a satire on humanity And a lamentation over it. And it is a triumph of Mr. Ger- hardi's manner, heady and deceptive like absinthe. Not .content with slipping about like a chameleon in several styles of his own, he freakishly adapts at times the modes of others. The adventure of the pale primroses " on the mountain- height has the cool irresponsible dexterity of Paul Morand. Lord Ottercove is described with the_relishing ways of Arnold Bennett ; and he is made the bosom friend of that novelist, under the name of Vernon Sprott. It is impossible to number the surprises of the narrative. Eva, the flower of the aston- ishing Kerr family, talks very often like Loreley the bloride, looks, one imagines, like a Marie Laurencin, and almost rises into poetry at the conclusion. In the second part Lord de Jones, adventist and scientist, " disintegrates the atom " ; and the Earth vanishes away, except for a Tyrolean mountain which he has inoculated against the disease, and Which represents the " jasper of the New Jerusalem. But it is evident that the old lusts, violences, satieties, will begin again on the diminished planet. Meanwhile, what has not been lost ? " His face puckered. He turned away to the clouds chasing in the unmeaning, unmerciful vault ; and wept." So ends the hero. For all.the gay improprieties and wild mockeries of the book, some of the readers, overcome by- the underlying melancholia, the deep despair of life, may end it likewise. Their sensations will be very conflicting ; but it is not a conflict to be avoided by any student of contemporary fiction.
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