THE WOMAN OF IHORNDEN
The Challenge to Sirius. By Sheila Kaye-Smith. 12mo. 442 pages. E. P. Dutton & Company. New York.
The Four Roads. Sheila Kaye-Smith. 12mo. 320 pages. George H. Doran. New York.
MODERN art subsists to a remarkable extent by taking in its own washing. Novelists adopt poets for heroes, who write sonnets on pictures, for which musicians compose orchestral settings. Painters contribute fantastic portraits of all these folks and become in turn the heroes of new novels; the circle is complete. Think over the list of Mr. Cannan's chief characters, or Sinclair's, or Romain Rolland's. It is true of course that an occasional hero is free from the taint of art; he is always different, however, from the mass of men, having at least the artistic sensibilities. Sometimes an author dives into the sea of life and grasps an authentic, unliterary experience; at such occasions we have reason to be grateful. Sheila Kaye-Smith has made the plunge and returned tightly clutching a bit of soil.
No wonder she prizes her discovery, for the soil is not merely the background of her novels; it serves also to motivate the actions of her characters; in fact the earth of Sussex might be called the chief of her dramatis personae. It is not by oversight that her heroes are never allowed to love a woman very strongly. The real affection is for the ground itself. No more is it accidental that Miss Kaye-Smith grows impassioned only, when she describes a landscape, analyzing her characters as coldly as if they were mathematical theorems. She has laid claim to a corner of England, but her ownership is one of the soil alone; with the ways of its inhabitants she has little sympathy.
There is, on the border of Kent and Sussex, a district of hillocks and spongy pastures, with farms caught in a web of little, twisting lanes. Here blooms a riot of wild plants—"bright colours and soft pungent smells, like wasp-thridden apples lying in the grass. The
