the fields of marl which are their livelihood. It is from the style, however, that the volume derives much of its worth. This quality is one of which our generation seems almost unconscious. We know that George Moore writes good prose—he has told us so himself. Critics trumpet the perfection of Conrad in our ears. Appreciation of the cadenced beauty which characterizes. The Challenge to Sirius, however, rests on no publicity methods. The ideas which Miss Kaye-Smith expresses are often banal—she is naively indifferent to her own platitudes—but the sentences that clothe them are hammered in bronze; each one perfect, each sufficient to itself.
The flux and reflux of sentences such as these makes beautiful the prose of The Four Roads. Here the subject is Sussex in wartime. One hears at first the boom of ghostly artillery across the Channel as a dissonance in the usual hum of afternoon. Later it grows louder, threatening to destroy utterly this peaceful countryside. Sussex triumphs over the guns; with the young men killed, there is left another generation to grasp the warm plough-handles that the fathers had dropped. The victory, however, is precarious, and the new Sussex is not the peaceful county of Victoria's reign that sowed and reaped and voted Tory to keep the prices up.
As a novel The Four Roads is almost everything that its precursor was not. The real hero is a village instead of one man; despite this fact, the story is distinctly of a single piece. One does not pick many flaws; neither does one grow especially enthusiastic. Tom Beatup and his stolid, maternal Thyrza; Tom's younger brothers; Jerry, the scapegrace son of the Nonconformist parson and a gypsy woman from Thornden: all these characters are delineated with infinite understanding but without real sympathy. Miss Kaye-Smith, near as she is to the heart of Sussex, is a stranger to its people, much like the woman of Thornden who married there and died and was a friend only to the wild twisting roads. Or she is like the Frank Rainger of the earlier volume, who, she says, "had sunk into the fibre of Moon's Green like a nail embedded in the live trunk of an oak. He would always be different in substance from his surroundings."
This charge of lack of sympathy can hardly be brought against her portrait of the Reverend Mr. Sumption. A gaunt, lonely Baptist, he too was a stranger to the folk among whom he lived. His son, his flock, his faith: one after another the war deprives him of
