FICTION.
THE DEATH OF SOCIETY.f
Miss HoMER Wilsorr's book The Death of Society is one whose faacination it is impossible to convey in an abstract. Couched in few sentences, its theme may sound an almost repulsive ono, and only the reading of the book in its entirety can convey the quality by which it stands or falls, its beauty, and its odd mountain glamour.
• The World of Sound. By Sir William Bragg. London : G. Bell and Eons. [es. net.] t The Death of Society. By Romer Wilson. London : Collins. [78. 6d. net.1
A young Englishman rides across the Dovrefjeld in Norway. As he journeys he sees a drive leading up to a country house.
Partly out of curiosity, partly to inquire his way, he rides up to the house, which proves to belong to a philosopher, a friend and critic of Ibsen's, who lives there with his wife and two daughters. Remote and withdrawn, they live there a kind of separate existence with a standard of life and a set of ideas such as might possibly become current in the world in the course of another hundred years. A part of this morality would seem at first sight the negation of virtue, and we are made to see that after "the death of society" tragedies of love will probably often be substituted for tragedies of marriage. On some days in May, when the sky has been watered by vehement showers, we see a range of distant hills with extraordinary clearness against the blue shadows of the extremer distance. " Tho glad light green" of the young beech leaves stands out miraculous, the sun shines for a moment, we see the heavy cloud that is about to eclipse it, but that makes the momentary glimpse the brighter. Such is the illumination of this novel. We breathe the air of Fata Morgana.
A groat deal of the pleasure afforded to the reader lies in the extremely compact and vivid descriptions. Here is tho account of a room in the Ingmans' house :—
"The hall ran across the whole centre of the house and was large and full of space. At both sides there were windows, and a row of pillars carved and painted like totem-poles supported the upper storey. In the centre of the room stood a huge table of unvarnished oak with carved trestle legs. A set of pewter candlesticks was placed upon it, and around it were arranged heavy carved and painted chairs. Highly varnished vermilion wooden chests, painted with jasmine flowers in green and white, stood under the walls, and in the brick fire-place largo logs smouldered upon iron dogs. . . Ingman went to the fire place and taking an armful of spruce branches from a large farmer's basket, threw them down upon the logs and waited until they flared up into a lively blaze."
Then, again, the description of Langehaarfos :—
" Rosa Ingrnan used to bring me here when I was a small child, and she used to smile at me until I thought I didn't want anything else but to see her smile. She used to smile and say that she thought the waterfall was beautiful. I always thought she was more beautiful, and that she hung the water from the top of the mountain to please me ! ' " That last phrase is surely exquisite. Also intellectually delightful is Ingman's account of his threefold methods of criticism.
The Death of Society is in some ways a curious book to have been written by a wonian, for we believe most readers will agree with us in thinking that only the two men in the story quite come alive. The three women—the heroine, the mysterious Rosa Ingman, and her two daughters Hilde and Nathalia—are all more or less will-o'-the-wisps and vanish with the closing of the book, the young man and the philosopher and the atmo- sphere of a northern spring alone surviving that cataclysm.
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