BRIEFER MENTION
Captures, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 305 pages; Scribner: $2) opens with what is easily the most important story in the volume—A Feud. It is a beautifully balanced tale, rich with the atmosphere of the English countryside and the emotional implications so largely depending thereon. In a sense complementary to this is The Man Who Kept His Form, apotheosizing the quiet, triumphant changelessness of the English aristocrat despite apparent failure. The sketches following these two stories, although gleaming with the fine, reserved words that have power to convey subtle insights, are disconcertingly slight and by-the-way. Galsworthy emphasizes the artificiality of the form he so competently, and sometimes exquisitely, masters.
Grey Wethers, by V. Sackville-West (12mo, 328 pages; Doran: $2) has its origin and validity in the setting. The author has tried to symbolize the English downs by typifying their outstanding moods in the characters, their grandeur and immutability in the action of her story. Although the stern freedom that is their keynote is excessively romanticized, a greyly glamorous generalization has been effected; but neither the downs nor their personification have been arrested in any specific, distinctive dramatization. Miss Sackville-West has done well to limit her subject matter more vigorously than in Challenge; her development of it has gained correspondingly in directness and a well-contained richness.
Weird Tales, by E. T. W. Hoffmann, translated from the German by J. T. Bealby (12mo, 344 pages; Scribner: $2.50). "But wonderful are the doings of Accident!" the author is moved to exclaim in one of his stories, while elsewhere a character finds that "accident came to his rescue." With this rather lenient attitude towards his craft, Hoffmann could let his parlour fantasy play about a world of people who, while not subtle enough figures to compel interest in their characters, usually possess sufficiently marked attributes to interest us in their welfare. Hoffmann's "weirdness," however, is a little too much like the dungeon scene in one-night-stand opera, where the massive canvas rocks sway slightly as the curtain rises. Much more authentic is the appeal of an occasional passage which reconstructs the somewhat ceremonious but amiable times in which the author lived and for which his work was best adapted.
Malice, by Pierre MacOrlan (16mo, 242 pages; G. Crés: Paris). There is a golem, a devil in shape of an old Jew, a young man who trades his soul for a rope to hang himself: in short, all the machinery of German romantic novels of the early nineteenth century, but employed ironically against the strictly modern background of the city of Mainz in 1922. Malice has the air of being an Expressionist poster to advertise the spectacle of moral decay, naively vicious, but not unaesthetic, which is one side only of Germany since the war.
