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The Haunting, by C. Dawson-Scott (12mo, 310 pages; Knopf: $2). Out of a chunky foreshortened Van Gogh painting of Cornish village life, where each thick sensitive dab of colour brings up the rich solidity of background; out of a peculiarly English substantiality of cottage and garden and homely character, emerges the ghost of this story—a "new" ghost, spun of the psychological texture of a man's mind and moored to actuality by thistledown threads, yet triumphantly simulating the real by a protective colouring of natural life. An excellent study of immobile matter interpenetrated by the eternally mobile.
Children of the Market Place, by Edgar Lee Masters (12mo, 469 pages; Macmillan: $2) is not so much a historical novel as an attempt to be a history and novel at one and the same time. The history centres in the personality of Stephen Douglas, the great northern Democrat of the decades before the Civil War. The rapid development of Illinois, the slavery question, the advent of Lincoln, come in for a treatment that is neither informative nor distinguished. The novel that elbows its way through Mr Masters' historical lumber is curiously devoid of human interest. The characters are as placidly dead as those found in any rural album of family photographs, and a number of them are the excuse for a bit of harmless philosophizing to boot. The deadness of the book is in contrast to its galvanic and not always grammatical style. Closing this volume one blinks with incredulity. One remembers the prophets who concluded their reviews of Spoon River Anthology with the remarks that Mr Masters had the instinct of portraiture, that he had strayed into verse under a slight misunderstanding, and that he ought and probably would turn to prose narrative. These prophets were not wholly wrong.
My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock (12mo, 264 pages; Dodd, Mead: $1.50) has so many good passages in it, most of them humorous, that the reader regrets more than ever Mr Leacock's having become a professional humorist at times. A Lost Satirist is suggested, after reading the best of these sketches, is a not too irrevocable epitaph.
Terribly Intimate Portraits, compiled by Noel Coward, illustrations by Lorn Macnaughtan (8vo, 212 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2) suggest, with a difference, Belloc's The Aftermath, down to the press-clippings. That is the manner; but it isn't done. It is thin and dull and well-intentioned and generally awful.
An Outline of Wells, by Sidney Dark (8vo, 200 pages; Putnam: $2.50). A defence of Wells, the artist, from the thrusts of adverse criticism. Mr Dark has written the book with an evident chip on his shoulder. He begins by resenting the idiosyncrasies of genius, from which H. G. Wells as the short, stocky, and democratic Britisher has apparently escaped. He objects to the intellectual who "stands at the street corners and thanks God that he is not as other men." Wells does not. But Mr Dark's chief quarrel is with H. L. Mencken whom he quotes not infrequently. These quotations, incidentally, form the only vital bits of critical analysis in the entire work. The author is not spiteful, however, and his comparisons are interesting.
