The Grey World. By Evelyn Underhill. (W. Heinemann. 6s.)—This is
a striking book. In the first scene we are introduced to a little boy—a street-arab—dying in a hospital. He passes into the next life, and finds himself "a little ghost adrift in a strange world from which all colour had been with- drawn." This new world, however, "was not a legendary land of shadows, but the solid earth on which he had passed ten years of aggressively material life." But he saw the former things "in a new perspective, a thin grey unsubstantial world like a badly focussed photograph." After a while he realises that he is not alone, but in a crowd of other beings like himself, "all wearily searching for company, interests, something that had been made necessary to them in the life now passing away. They went on hopelessly, endlessly ; the noise which he heard was the complaint which they made to the enveloping greyness because of the hard- ness of their quest." At last, in horror and dismay, "he flung out the whole force of his poor little spirit in prayer to some Force which he knew not," and in answer to his supplication was born again into the material world, this time as the son of a rich wholesale tailor living in a suburban villa. The boy grows up keeping the recollection of his former existences, the slum life and the life of the "Grey World," and the author maintains throughout the book a somewhat discordant contrast between her hero's inner life and his sordid, though luxurious, sur- roundings. It is sometimes difficult to believe that both sides of the story could come out of one imagination. As he grows up the horror of death and of a return to an immaterial existence grows upon the young man ; but with the increasing dread comes an increasing conviction that there must be some way of living in this present life, some mental attitude which can be cultivated, which would make the next not only endurable but desirable, not only a condition of repining but a place of fulfilment,—that those in the "grey world" were those, and those only, to whom material things had been all in all. How he works out his salvation we leave the reader to find out. As he reads he will discover that the earthly side of the book is as original as the. spiritual, though far less attractive.
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