Three Novels from Three Civilizations
Beatrice : a Novel. And Other Stories, By Art hur Schnitzler. Translated from the German by Agnes Jacques and Elsie M. Lang. (T. Werner-Laurie. 7s. ed.) Sands of Fortune. By Sinclair Murray. (John Murray. 7s. (hi.) OF these three examples of the literary form in which the spirit of the age prefers: to express itself, the least significant of the group is unfortunately by the English author. In Sands of Fortune his talent is surely languid. At the beginning of the book the Crewe family is enduring existence on £750
a year : one wonders at the end if they were worth so much. The father is a likeable little man ; the other characters in the book are feeble puppets. But doubtless many readers enjoy a little Mayfair, a little dancing, a little Chelsea, a little finance, a little perfunctory love-making, all quite agreeably put together.
Money, obviously, is also the theme of Mr. Booth Tark-
ington's Plutocrat ; but it is money in a mighty sense, " big money," money like a brazen barbarian god out of ;he Middle West. Mr. Booth Tarkington is here out to prove that a millionaire may be wise and - good as well is funny. Funny in an unsubtle ways Mr: Tinker eertaiidY 'is, though outside the pages of the book his indomitable humours might be as unbearable to us as, within them, to the highbrow *young playwright, whose futility is so miserably brought home to him while the triumphal Tinker towers august on his camels in the Africa of luxurious tourists, raining silver on the bizarre populations, and reminding appreciative observers of Carthaginian generals and "New Romans." Mr. Tarking- 'ton's story moves on the coloured superficies of existence; but his people are vivacious, and, as one naturally expects from the creator of the perfectly filmable attitudes of Monsieur Beaucaire and the incidents of the infinite desoeuerement of the boy Penrod, they are also various. There is real gaiety in the wake of the unconscious plutocrat ; and we see him borne off in apotheosis to visit the Bey of Algeria, with a tolerant smile, frankly amused, though perhaps refusing assent to the novelist's allocation of values.
Neither of these two books will long outlast the yearly demand for fresh fiction. The work of Arthur Schnitzler, though its theme be only vain-desire and vain-regret, has penetrated the consciousness of Europe, for it is part of the psychology of a dying dynasty and a people passing with music and dancing and charming interludes to a terrific change. In the days before the War, when ladies, sheathed in pale satins split to the knee, wore wigs of silver and green ,and violet, when the love of pleasure had become a kind of hysteria, and Vienna was one of the capitals of delight, the "silken satires" of Arthur Schnitzler and the tender infidel- 'ties of his Anatol presented a poignant new flavour to London. His novels and dramas became familiar, and all the shifts, evasions, ironies, and disenchantments of his sad sweet folk, with their Latin wit, their Slavonic fatalism, their German speech. They meet and part in garden-places ; they walk by bright waters murmuring unhappy things ; they cling to each other in passionate crises that promise deliverance, till these also became a habit and a distress. They are the last wistful leaves drifting in a land of ancient cities, a mighty mysterious river, and an august history. They instinctively fall into Watteau-like groups, and make their own distrustful version of L'Embarquement pour la Cythere, for it is always autumn, it is always sunset, there always are plaintive violins and moving waters, and the morrow will be red.
Beatrice is one of Schnitzler's more concentrated studies of women, and one of his tenderest. All his women are love's victims ; and he analyses them with the comprehension of a physician and the compassion of a friend. They are desirous, but they waste their hearts innocently like flowers, and their very weaknesses are but the corruptions of the rose. Beatrice has a pure and noble soul ; but in the dying summer, among the woods and waters that seem to conspire to her 'undoing, she is stricken by desire as by an arrow she cannot withdraw. The story of her anguish and humiliation, and her distraction over her son, whose delicate first love is hurt beyond healing by a wanton woman, is told with candour and pathos. The conclusion, in which mother and son, aware of each other's pain, drift on the dark waters, and, sealed to each other by the mystic kiss of their reconciliation, consent to the purification of the great wave of death, has a dream-like beauty. The short stories that accompany Beatrice are episodes of a gracious and bitter kind of disillusionment that recalls the early lyrics of Verlaine.
THE GIPSY PATTERAN. Edited by Joseph Ellner. (Leonard Parsons. 7s. 6d.).—Makar Chudra distills the essence of gipsy philosophy in the story translated from the Russian of Maxim Gorki, when he says "Once you fall to thinking of life, you'll cease to love it. . . . Live, and that is all there is to it. Wander and see what is to be seen, and the longing sadness will never get hold of you." It is this kluality of vitality and freedom of the gipsy which arouses the admiration and envy of the Gorgios. There is something elemental about it which is strongly felt in these fascinating, apparently true, stories of the passions, custom and thoughts of this most exciting of all races. Don Pedro de Alecon, Miguel de Cervantes, Jean Richepin, William Sharp and Maxim Gorki all tell their vivid tales of the gipsy in Spain, France, England and Russia. A wealth of colour lies in it pages.
: MANHA'rl'AN TRANSFER. By John Dos Passos. (Con- stable. 76. 6d.)—Here is an amazing panorama of life in New York. Each chapter is broken up into a series of vividly contrasted scenes or episodes of city life. The connecting, thread is too slight and tortuous, however, to hold the average reader's attenton. As a kaleidoscope of the New Wo capital the book is remarkably clever. But it needs thcn a literal description of life to make a novel.
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