GENTLE SORCERY
Moonshine and Clover. A Doorway in Fairyland. By Laurence Housman. 8vo. 219 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2 each volume.
IN THESE tales selected from four volumes published previously, the outstanding impression is that of moral sensibility; a heightened sense of the appropriateness of outward beauty to inward—as in the case of Mr Housman's novel, The Sheepfold. But whereas the austerity and calm but torrential force in The Sheepfold make it unique, there is variableness in the symmetry and in the power of the telling of these later stories. The fairy-tale, like the question, bespeaks faith in the outcome of what is not yet evolved; and in their prime quality of illusory credibility, Mr Housman's tales command belief. One reads eagerly until the end has been reached, infinitesimally disaffected by an occasional flaw. Although usually in the fairy-tale, good triumphs over evil and virtue is synonymous with beauty, an appearance of moral insouciance is essential; and in a number of these stories, one sees perhaps too plainly, the wish to bless. Also, evolving from an affection for the child mind and perhaps from a wish not to labour the matter, we have from time to time a kind of diminutive conversation as of an adult in the nursery, which is death to the illusion of make-believe. There is poetic security, however, in the statement, "he closed his eyes, and, with long silences between, spoke as one who prayed," and in the observation that Toonie's wife when her husband did not return, "became a kind of widow"; the pace is especially businesslike in this story of Toonie. Minute rapier-like shafts of crossing searchlights seem to play upon the "tight panting little bodies" whose sentinel Toonie outwitted, "picking him up by the slack of his breeches, so that his arms and legs trailed together along the ground." In The Traveller's Shoes, one is infected with the poison of
"Sister, sister; bring me your hair,
Of our mother's beauty give me your share.
You must grow pale, while I must grow fair!"
