The Relentless City. By E. F. Benson. (W. Heinemann. 6s.)
—Mr. Benson is extremely fond of holding up a :mirror to modern society, and bidding it look at its own frightfulness. In this novel ho has carried his reflector over the Atlantic and held it up there. It must be owned, however, that the mirror in question is of the kind which men sometimes use as a shaving-glass,—it has a high power of magnifying the objects reflected in it. But like all similes, this image of the mirror is misleading, for perhaps Mr. Benson in his methods does not so much magnify what ho sees as imagine, when he is looking at a very small portion of a particular world, that he sees it all. Especially is this the case in his view of America. There is certainly a set of multi-millionaires on the "other side" who give free rein to the disordered fancies in which their wealth allows them to indulge, and carry extravagance and luxury to a ridiculous point. But Mr. Benson is very much mis- taken if he believes these persons represent the whole of America, or even the whole of American society. Indeed, one may go further and say that they do not represent the whole of New York society, though New York is doubtless their head- quarters, as it is the " Relentless City " of Mr. Benson's title. It will probably not be too much to say that there is a large intellectual society in New York into which the kind of people drawn by Mr. Benson could not enter whatever the resources of their wealth. Once acknowledge, however, that Mr. Benson has rashly judged "from half the whole," and it may be granted that he has produced a very telling satire of ultra-rich society. The book is, as usual when Mr. Benson writes in this vein, both brilliant and vulgar, and sometimes the vulgarity gets so com- pletely the upper hand that the reader is tempted to throw it down. People familiar with New York will be amused by the following passage, which describes the chief millionaire of the
book taking a• business drive in London Mr. Palmer drove there now in his noiseless motor brougham, looking out with his
piercing gray eyes on the grimy splendor of Pall Mall As usual, a large extent of the pavement was up for repairs, and it vexed his sense of speed and efficiency to see the leisurely manner in which the work was done." The resident in New York is not so unfamiliar with the slow methods of street repair as Mr. Benson imagines. The characters in the book are well and firmly drawn, and though the reader will find it difficult to sympathise with any one of them, they are not, with a few exceptions, quite so worthless a set as the people usually depicted by Mr. Benson when he embarks on a book of this type. The novel can only be recommended to readers who are not squeamish, but its offences are, on the whole, rather against taste than morality.
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