The Face of Clay. By Horace Annesley Vachell. (John Murray.
6s.)—Read in the light of his charming dedication, Mr Vachell's description of his book as an " interpretation" may be understood to mean an interpretation to English people of Brittany and the Breton peasant, and certainly this is what is best in a novel of which the plot is a little commonplace. The story of the heroine, again, is not very artistically constructed, and it has a slightly clumsy effect that the episode of her attaining fame as a prima donna during the ten years as to the history of which the author is silent, should be treated as a parenthesis. It seems impossible for a writer, however clever, to make a story dealing with a colony of artists anything but conventional, and there is nothing so dreary as the conventionality of an unconventional subject. From this dreariness stories dealing with groups of English artists living in foreign places never successfully escape. In one sense, of course, Mr. Vachell may have chosen his conven- tional subject deliberately, as it is far more easy to cast a striking sidelight on the ways and feelings of the Breton peasant than to snake him the central figure in a modern novel. By occupying the centre of the stage with his artists, Mr. Vachell has enabled the Breton episodes to be sketched very rapidly and convincingly in a way which would not have been possible in a more detailed and finished study. It is difficult to feel much interest in the personages of the story, and both the heroine, Tephany, and the hero, Michael Ossory, are singularly unconvincing. But the book must be called successful, if only for the very striking background which Mr. Vachell gives to a drama otherwise lacking in intrinsic interest.
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