in disillusion which so often characterizes the modern critic of life is easy to understand. An attitude of disillusion, however, presupposes a necessity in the soul of the scoffer for that very fatuousness of noble aims which he carps at because unfulfilled in the lives of the persons which surround him. True simplicity recognizes values in life as beyond moral comment, and the negative fastidiousness of the sophisticated worldling is as puerile as the blind assertiveness of the self-enwrapped reformer. The latter half of Old Mole is a mongrel tract—mongrel because confused by the artistic pretext. It is concerned with a woman as seen through the eyes of two men. She exists as a mirror—herself quite featureless—in which is reflected the double-visaged masculine image. The professor interprets her for us as a priest his deity, but as she never manifests herself in word or act, we cease to believe in her. Mr. Cannan strikes these beings into puppet-like fixity with his synthetic utterance of the times.
Young Earnest is another book which begins with Mr. Cannan at his best and leaves us with Mr. Cannan at his triumphant worst, but the best is so very good that we put down the volume with a gratitude that is stronger than our irritation. This writer has an instinct for tragedy and time after time it leads him through his art to a vital and irreparable accumulation of problems. Presented with the verdict of his own genius, he refuses to recognize it. He cannot believe in problems which have no solution. Leave that for the Frenchman and the Russian. Young Earnest introduces us to an admirable creation, René's mother, an old woman solemn as earth, her actions inscrutably emoted from within. She is subject to the law of gravity. One associates with her all the dirtiness of death and birth. She fills space—does not merely film it—and she is isolated of course by the very vividness of her definitions. Against her is set René's father, Mr. Fourmy, a person whose necessities are only less deniable than his wife's. They represent an apotheosis of Mr. Cannan's reiterated challenge to life, and these two people are overpowering enough to make the meandering hopefulness of the spirit in which the book is completed seem childlike and vacuous in its futility. There is such an illusion of comradely sharing in the sensuous joys of love that the inequality of its results is like a betrayal. Every woman would, for a moment at least, reduce the man to her own level of weakness, and it maddens her that no power on earth
