LATE VIOLETS FROM THE NINETIES
The Blind Bow-Boy. By Carl Van Vechten. 12mo. 261 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
The Flowet Beneath the Foot. By Ronald Firbank. 12mo. 224 pages. Grant Richards. London.
MR VAN VECHTEN, in The Blind Bow-Boy, has tried his hand at a kind of burlesque fiction which we have all too little of in America: the satiric iridescent novel of the type of Zuleika Dobson and La Révolte des Anges; and, though he is at times a little less fantastic and less surprising than one could wish, he gets away with it, on the whole, very well. You must remember that he has had the hardihood to go to New York for his rococo Satyricon; and you may judge if New York is recalcitrant. The result is, I think, in spite of all the green orchids and the rose-jade cysts for cosmetics which Mr Van Vechten finds in East 19th Street, a little closer to the prosaic reality—or rather to the reality of ordinary fiction—than Mr Van Vechten probably intended. Harold's marriage with Alice Blake, the rich, boring, well-bred New York girl, might almost have come out of Mrs Wharton; it is rather the figure of Campaspe Lorillard who reaches the stature of high comic creation, and I am inclined to think the book should have been about her and not about Harold. Campaspe craves no other activity than the luxurious enjoyment of her mind, the play of an exquisite taste, and the exercise of a ruthless intelligence; she snubs her husband with a regal kindness, yet declines any other attachment, and sees as little of her children as possible, thereby trebling their interest in her. The only member of her family who interests her is her mother, whom she always calls by her first name. She is Mr Van Vechten's most successful achievement.
Of course, it is not in comparison with American books that I accuse Mr Van Vechten of being prosaic. Beside Floyd Dell and Willa Cather, he is Ariel, Till Eulenspiegel. But I have been reading The Flower Beneath the Foot by Mr Ronald Firbank, an author whom Mr Van Vechten enormously admires and with whom
