England—containing also a personality with a pungently bitter tang. In 1924, ostensibly eschewing "æsthetic effects," seeking only the beauty of a merciless veracity, he returned in imagination to the swart continent, and plucked at its mystery with even starker grip, with even more potent effect, in "Black Laughter." Now, in "Skin for Skin," with only occasional allusions to the profound and shattering adventure of his soul as a stockman in Uganda, he reverts to the origins of his vision and his point of view, giving us, in the same almost incredibly poignant style, his experience as an invalid in an Alpine sanatorium and as a convalescent in Southern England, during the period between his twenty-fifth year and his five years' sojourn in Africa.
I read these three books with a quickening of consciousness which I regard as one of the chief rewards for reading anything. I read them with intense excitement, exclaiming over page after page: "Upon my soul, what a writer! How the man can write!"—or words with an even higher accent but to the same effect. Among imaginative modern interpreters of nature and the soul of alien peoples, he belongs with men of the first mark—with Pierre Loti, Charles M. Doughty, D. H. Lawrence.
But already I hear a dissentient murmur rising, which sounds something like this: "Yes, a very striking writer, to be sure. Impressive books—in a way. But unpleasant . . . morbid . . . a taint in them. Clearly a man of abnormal sensibilities. Really, unhealthy books, you know . . . cruel and of a most dubious morality. A sick man's vision of life—after 'Skin for Skin' transparently so."
A sick man's vision of life. My first impulse is to
