OEDIPUS TYRANNUS
The Judge. By Rebecca West. 8vo. 492 pages. George H. Doran and Company. $2.50.
WHEN Rebecca West goes out at the end of the first act of Rosmersholm, the curtain falls on Madame Helseth muttering, "Lord—Lord! That Miss West! The things she says!" and I can imagine the writer who takes her pseudonym (if such it is) from Ibsen's alarming heroine provoking similar protests. For she too has no inhibitions and says the things she wants to say, in the way she wants to say them, equally careless of those she shocks by a morally painful subject, and those she annoys by an unfashionably romantic style.
Her literary reputation has till now been resting upon a high-spirited little book on Henry James; the best psychoanalytical novel yet published; and the best regular reviews now appearing of current fiction. Admirers of her Return of the Soldier, and her critical articles in the English New Statesman are at last given the work which they have so long been promised, a long and important novel, entitled The Judge.
Before the reader has finished three pages of it, he will settle himself more comfortably in his chair, and surrender himself to the powerful and lamentably rare pleasure of reading a writer who can write. Miss West does not use the staccato style As Now Worn by Leading Literary Ladies; her writing is rich, closely packed, highly coloured, and individual. It seems impossible for her to be careless, to take the easy, faded word, or to fall short of precision. Her imagination is primarily visual, and her landscapes stand out with mineral hardness and brilliance. Her style reflects her subjects, like a metal mirror, varying with their colours, but burnishing them all to an ardent, almost truculent, loveliness. Hardly one page of the four hundred but would provide an example, like this description of the Pentland Hills:
"Two grassy tracks went forward, both marked by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited to need a
