300
BRIEFER MENTION
The Hidden Road, by Elsie Singmaster (12 mo, 333 pages; Houghton, Mifflin: $2) led to mastery over the very impulses that had sent Phoebe Stanard along it. The book is a delicately handled, finished study of a girl whose mind was well above the average, but whose intellectual curiosity had always to be whipped into action through her desire to captivate a lover. There is no attempt to surround Phoebe with glamour. Her faults are insisted upon, and yet she is a very delightful heroine. The minor characters of the book are quite as artistically drawn as Phoebe; the backgrounds are the habitat of real people. Indeed the book ranks high as a well-written, genuine work of art, one of the best novels of the year.
Blindfold, by Orrick Johns (12mo, 259 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $2) sets out to be defiantly modern in theme and treatment, but gradually fades into a background not much more revolutionary than that of Way Down East. The ingredients are largely those of Newton Fuessle's recent Jessup—an illegitimate child who "makes good" in New York, and a painter father—although here the pattern is worked out to a tragic conclusion. Technically, the shift in the story from the father to the daughter weakens the interest; the connecting thread is not strong enough. Briefly, a novel which starts off realistically and ends melodramatically.
The attempt in Conquistador, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (12mo, 20§ pages; Scribner: $1.50) at a drama of conflicting bloods, Scotch and Spanish, succeeds in adding a thin narrative to the already sizeable literature of Puritan domination. For though the Spanish strain in Wharton Cameron, engineer-caballero, ties him by pledge to the hacienda in Mexico, the Puritan in him simply uses this setting for contrast and exploitation, and is in every main instance the psychological determinant. At the first genuine approach of passion, Cameron "threw back his head and stared at the dim rafters," saying to the charmer, Dona Flora, "You don't tempt me." And, even at the end, rejected by a one-time Boston sweetheart, forced to accept a Mexican girl because of this, Wharton loves her, Manuelita, chastely, only for one thing: a son and heir, and through him the perpetuation of Santa Eulalia, the hacienda. One is tempted, however, to overlook this failure of intention, for the book's banalities: "Men are men. And women are women"—"A caballero is a caballero still; cattle are cattle," et cetera, are not often to be found in contemporary writing.
Balloons, by Elizabeth Bibesco (12mo, 168 pages; Doran: $2) is the reverse of literary. Its author has the faculty, capitalized in newspaper serials and stories of the smart set and by all writers of ability, of getting down to business at once, touching the patient where he lives. She goes in for being frightfully subtle. In one breath she is perceptive, subtle, ingenious, glittering, tinny, thin, and complacent. Her cleverness betrays her. When she stops using people as mouthpieces for her dazzling little phrases and turns her shrewd eye on them, putting her cleverness to the laborious task of learning to project them dramatically, her books will be worth waiting for.
