The Fortune: A Romance of Friendship, by Douglas Goldring (12mo, 376 pages; Scott & Seltzer), is recommended by Romain Rolland. An indolent Irish rebel, a conscientious objector, and a thoughtless volunteer are the chief figures in a very well told story; but there is a sense of confusion because the author has not correctly distributed his centres of interest. A free spirit, as M. Rolland says. A great talent, probably. One looks forward to his next with more than usual interest.
Peter Kindred, by Robert Nathan (12mo, 362 pages; Duffield), is a first novel. Of prep school, college, adolescence, sex, first love, and economic theories it is regrettably true that you must forget them before you can remember them—and use them as materials for fiction. Mr. Nathan has forgotten nothing; it is all here; and it is vastly unimportant.
The House of Baltazar, by William J. Locke (12mo, 312 pages; Lane), a goodly tale in the true Lockian style, sets romantic middle age disporting genially in a unique plot.
The Mystery of the Blue Villa, by Melville Davisson Post (12mo, 360 pages; Appleton), contains seventeen stories that exemplify Mr. Post's readability. He guarantees diversion to the T. B. M.—or to the tired college professor, for that matter. He writes to be read, not worried about.
Black Branches, by Orrick Johns (12mo, 92 pages; Pagan Publishing Company, New York), is in part curiously original—the product of a spirit tormented by the nostalgia of the immaculate conception and obsessed with a passion to compose etudes on recondite words. The rest is overburdened with imitations of Alfred Kreymborg and T. S. Eliot.
The Singing Caravan, by Robert Vansittart (12mo, 168 pages; Doran), hammers mysticism into clean, efficient verse, which in its ease and correctness, displays the immense technical equipment of the recent English poets; but his subject matter shows the lack of freshness and homeliness that handicaps the Georgian Poets as a group in comparison with their American rivals.
