LUST AND HATE
The Left Leg. By T. F. Powys. 12mo. 311 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
SEVERAL years ago Mr T. F. Powys bade a peremptory farewell to the complex artifices of modern culture, and retired to the country to save his soul. The first fruit of his rustication was a small and mediocre tract called Soliloquies of a Hermit. When that book was written Mr Powys was painfully conscious of his isolation, and the very humility which he practised so diligently testified to the superior contentment of a man who at last was released from the intellectual enigmas of the world. He was glad to get close to the earth, to apostrophize crumbling fences and the waning moon; he was thoroughly sick of the recondite formulas of literature and the barren inhumanities of art—he would look deeply within the hearts of yokels for the secrets of salvation. "It is terrible," he wrote, "to think that the evil smell of modern oil has got to me, and that the vile working-devils would try to pump petrol into my soul." Somewhat in the manner of Papini he began to reread the gospels, but unlike the Italian bigot, he neither inflated nor capitalized his Christian spirit. But his book was a failure—prolix adaptations from the New Testament, and the simple joys of "youths and maidens sporting on the village green." Apparently Mr Powys was only another defeated young man who had discovered in his retirement that he had nothing to say.
The Left Leg, however, has justified the author’s seclusion. It is a much better book than the ridiculous title would indicate; in fact, a work of uncommon beauty, decidedly different from Soliloquies of a Hermit, and possessed of many of the qualities of fine fiction. Mr Powys is no longer the preacher—a more intimate acquaintance with the Dorset villagers has robbed him of his faith; and though he has failed to save his soul, he has taken the raw materials of rural life and shaped them into literary forms, and that, in itself, is one kind of salvation. There is no love in these three stories: the author hates his characters, and the characters hate one another; the book is a shrewd and contemptuous study of the
