DEVON IDYLLS.* MR. PHILLPOTTS in this beautifully printed and illustrated

book has brought before us in an elaborate series of word- pictures almost every phase of almost every day of the year in Devon, the county that he loves. There are in all thirty- eight word-pictures, fitly illustrated by Mr. J. Ley Pethybridge.

Some of these illustrations are very charming, and manifest

considerable delicacy of touch. They are perhaps somewhat uneven in artistic value, and show in some cases an almost Japanese flatness of surface, which is probably in part due to the process of reproduction. This is, however, a criticism that must not be taken too much to heart, for the artist has certainly entered very fully into the word-painter's ideas and imagery. "The Girl in the Apple Orchard," illustrating the chapter entitled "Promise," is exquisite.

Charming as Mr. Phillpotts's. own work is, we feel that in the matter of style it is open to criticism. It is continuously over-elaborate, and this tends to a certain monotony. What we may call the prose-caesura is not used with skill. Often in long passages it is not used at all. The continuity of sweet- ness and minute descriptiveness is unbroken. The mind gets hungry for rugged words and abrupt transitions. Now the

great stylists are ever on their guard against this danger. Gibbon—a prose-writer, of course, of a very different order— maintains his style, with its magnificent roll, throughout the length of his great work, but, by devices of various kinds, he makes the reader feel that the style is the atmosphere of

the work, not the work itself, and keeps the mind on the matter without a persistent obtrusion of the manner.

The reader is reminded continually that Rome is the thing in hand by blunt, short commonplaces, sentences which have their proper place in the whole sonorous fugue, but which looked at and read as sentences by themselves are quite un- obtrusive. Ruskin was an even greater master of the prose.

caesura. He broke the harmonies at pleasure, and resolved the discords with a skill that seemed quite unconscious. His ebb and flow is broken by innumerable ripples over jewelled fancies, and by occasional vast breakers that shout and sound round some great rock of thought. Mr. Phillpotts's prose flows like an even, beautiful stream between beautiful banks. Nothing disturbs its serenity ; the shining stones of the stream bed and the flowers on the etream margin are all dreamily on view. It is a painted waterway amidst a painted landscape. Unconsciously enough, perhaps, but evidently, Mr. Phillpotts's style is influenced by Mr. Pater and 11 Pierre Loti, though the flow and minute detail of the latter are more noticeable than the mosaics of the former or his pungent mannerism. Some examples of Mr. Phillpotts's work will bring out these points :—

" Beneath this orchard there spreads a carpet woven of many greens, of sunlight, and spring flowers. The daisy, the butter- cup, the the speedwell, and the budding blossoms of the grasses are rippling to my feet, while where the orchard slopes towards a hazel hedge, great snow-white umbel-bearers rise above lesser things, and the dock and the burdock prosper, and the swords of the yellow iris shine blue-green above running water. The nettles, in vigorous communities, look grey amid so much young verdure, and the last of the bluebells hang their heads where the ferns uncurl beside them. Huge, cool shadows, almost purple, fall upon this carpet, and growing deeper with distance, they make a sort of soft gloom through the regiments of the tree-stems. The trunks spring upwards at all angles, of all shapes, inscribed with every fantastic lichen-word that the Mother writes on ancient barks. In tones of ripe, mossy green, of silver-brown, and of silver-grey, the apple trees stand ; with wild, perfect confusion they thrust forth their boughs. The branches strike out abruptly ; they start oblique; they spring aloft, then droop ; they droop, then rise ; they turn upon themselves and twist lovingly back to the parent stem ; they trace a maze against the grey of winter skies; and now they furnish meet frameworks for the glory of foliage and of bloom. Their forms are partly hidden at this hour, and the wonderful harmonies of line and reticulation of boughs are almost draped in leafy garments, almost wreathed with flowers."

That is an example of Mr. Phillpotts's prose in its most detailed

form. The wealth of observation—the orchard, it will be noticed, was not all that a Devon apple orchard should be— and the careful choice of words .produce a picture, but it is a picture in which the details have crowded out the motive ; a picture, moreover, that has some of the " flatness " which we

noticed in writing of Mr. Pethybridge's illustrations. The elaboration of the detail, indeed, occasionally makes the

• My Decor, Year. By Edon Phillpotta. London Methuen and Co. [21a. net.] reader think that the writer doth protest too much. The nettles, for instance, probably looked grey through the effects of polarised light, as is so often the case with grass when looked at from a certain position. The greyness would perhaps have vanished had the observer moved a pace. "The last of the bluebells" is clearly a slip of memory. Again, a little further on in the same idyll we are told that "the blackbird —who alone of birds can put imagination into his song—flutes it unseen." Now as a matter of fact a blackbird cares very little where he "flutes it" as long as he does so, and he has certainly less imagination in his song than either the thrush, the skylark, or the robin, the blackcap or the nightingale. Of course, this is a matter de gustibus, and Mr. Phillpotts has a right to his opinion, though the testimony of poets, naturalists, and most observers seems to be against him.

We must, however, return to quotation. The following passage shows Mr. Phillpotts's work to much better advantage :—

"I know a grey ring of stone that lies between two hills, shines there in summer sunlight, glimmers through mist and rain, vanishes awhile at the time of snow. It is uplifted under the sky ; its ruins, despite their age, are very perfect ; within its embrace lie four-and-twenty homes of the Neolithic or later stone- men, who flourished here before history has anything to tell of England By the granite foundations of their homes, by their walls raised for defence against man or beast, by their mystic circles still standing on lonely heaths, by their alignments and monoliths, and by the places where they laid their dead, the races of old time may be brought a little nearer, and their story shadowed in this record of plutonian rocks."

The following passage perhaps shows Mr. Phillpotts at his best :— " Over the remote estuary of Exe the sun shot long rays out of the mists ; while to the North extended forests, and appeared a church above white cots all set in woods. Then fertile leagues spread with many undulations, until afar off, twin towers arose and faint smoke hung above the Faithful City. Along the river there extended a great and peaceful park, and wooded hills in many folds above it lifted the eye to Dartmoor, whose ancient loneliness arose out of the West, with peaks and pinnacles and one huge dome, whose Cosdon Beacon hove up its girth and guarded the central Moor. At the footstools of the hills great forests loomed darkling through the haze, and above them, the faint diaphanous breath of the wind spun magic webs of light, with an inner glow that enshrined the day's splendour. To the West, golden mists shone above the setting place of the sun and already fashioned the glories of his pall ; such rest and peace as only Autumn knows brooded over the world ; and in the silence one could almost hear the downward flutter of each leaf, the fall of seed and gleaming berry, as they descended to the earth. Orchards and beech woods, oak woods, sere stubbles, and acres of ripe roots lay there in the glory of accomplishment. The harvest was complete, to the cup of the little campion brimming with grain beneath my eye ; all had nobly ended, and the blessing of rest was well won."

This description, despite needless inversions, has much that is lifelike in it. Indeed, all Mr. Phillpotts's work is close to Nature, and full of patient and valuable observation. But it is a transcript, and not natural. The art that adds to Nature must be natural. A revival in literature can hardly come till we become more natural, more simple in art. But that does not prevent this book from being a very charming production.