In "This Mad Ideal," however, I find no advance in the development of the theme, and a marked falling off in the artistic resources. Judith is merely an excessively attenuated sketch of Felix Fay. Her rebellion and the first steps in her adventure are presented with a sophomoric thinness, and with only an occasional glimpse of the "tendrils of imagination" reaching into empty space.
If Mr. Dell is to hold our attention as historian of experiments on the Bohemian coast, it is clear that he should not waste another book in proving to us merely that girls and boys have a pathetic hunger for happiness; that they rebel against a conventional society which objects to their entering where they conceive happiness to be, and that, consequently, they go seeking in Bohemia for "companionships at once light and gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting."
We know all that well enough. He has communi-, cated to us the shape of his ideal, and we acknowledge that it has a certain attraction on paper. But in order to develop his theme he must proceed to a far more realistic account than he has yet given us of the collision of his dream with reality. In his first three novels there were a good many interesting conclusions presented or implied: for example, the Moon-Calf discovered to his own complete satisfaction that he was merely a silly ass to go looking for his kind of intoxication in alcohol, or for his species of dream-girls among factory hands and shopgirls and casual neurotic schoolgirls hunting boys by the pheasant cage in the park, and drunken girls in roadhouses, and prostitutes, and hectic maudlin girls in the piggery of drunken Bohemian parties. One by one, the dreaming
