THE FIRST BOOK OF MARY BUTTS
Speed the Plough, and Other Stories. By Mary Butts. 12mo. 222 pages. Chapman and Hall, Ltd. London.
MISS BUTTS' collection of stories can be likened only to master-work: Dubliners or Mr Lawrence's England My England. It is the announcement of a new intellect, acute and passionate, to scrutinize experience with an unfamiliar penetration and to substitute for it, as it ceases, new form and light.
The light is tragic. Funereal mother, she hurries her exact heart-breaking figures into rigid graves or silence; without explanation or complaint; in a bare parti-coloured light, "all the epiphany you've got for the fine clothes, and the fine movements, and the sensual elegance, and the silly imagination, and the pain." What is done, is still; the memory can make these events a part of itself, but cannot turn them into theory or proposal. The result in sorrow and sweetness is great; halted by an aesthetic intuition at the exact point where it would become sensational.
English to the core, her good is serenity. Something over and above the décor of passion and inquisition of pain, like a David and Jonathan pact, is its nearest equivalent in conduct. The elaborate genius of her race enchants or bewilders a foreign mind: of two common labourers, "They were pleased that they recognized without philanthropy, or commiseration their contrasted pride and grace." Beyond that, there is no "impulse of malice, indignation, despair," and little comparative appraisal.
Therefore, the tales are sinister when not idyllic. No emphases are made for the benefit of society; hungriest youth could not regard these parables as aid. The fierce passions belong to the author's mind; it has not pretended, or spied on civilization. Particularly in In Bayswater, the absence of praise and blame gives a terrific tragic tonality to the whole; one choir of instruments stilled, for a purpose. The purpose is an artificial savagery, deliberate and strong; furthered by Miss Butts' refusal to employ any modern convenience of interpretation or terminology. The parent devour-
