BRIEFER MENTION
507
Dobachi, by John Ayscough (12mo, 284 pages; Macmillan: $2). Prevailing tendencies in fiction have not bothered Mr Ayscough; his novel is about as old-fashioned as a felt boot, and put together with approximately the same degree of grace. The narrative, with its setting a New England village of Cornish puritans, fails to come to life under the prodding of a laborious pen; the author accepts defeat at the hands of his heroine with only two-thirds of the book written and sighs: "All this happened long before I was born: no record of her suspicions has been handed down, and I do not choose to guess at her feelings in the matter." Mr Ayscough, it appears, is a novelist who takes no liberties.
Bread, by Charles Gilman Norris (12mo, 511 pages; Dutton: $2) may be edible, but it is neither nutritious nor palatable. The author is an indiscriminatingly voluble slave of the realistic school with no suspicion that by showing the romance of the commonplace the commonplace itself may be revealed. He has dedicated an egregiously drab book to the proposition that existence is a bad business. In a style as formless as an amoeba he emulates the specious exactitude of Sinclair Lewis and the mania of Upton Sinclair for persecuting maladjustments. His report bears the same distortive resemblance to life that stenographic symbols have to the words they stand for.
An Outlaw's Diary: Revolution, by Cecile Tormay (8vo, 291 pages; McBride: $3) is a record of a patrician's reactions to the subversion of the old order which took place in Hungary in 1918. Patriotism and conservatism are the author's fetishes. There is no attempt at an unbiased viewpoint in the book, and too little discrimination between fact and hearsay. The unrelieved extravagance of emotions at times arouses the reader's impatience, until he reasons that probably it was in just proportion to the tumultuous terrors of the time. And, since scepticism of the underlying sincerity is inadmissible, he cannot shut out the hysterical cry of impassioned resentment and cumulative despair.
The Ancient Beautiful Things, by Fannie Stearns Davis (12mo, 82 pages; Macmillan: $1). The author paints upon a narrow canvas, and is at her best when picturing the fireside and the cradle; but, within her limited fields, she writes with a directness and a genuineness of emotion. The book is impressive because the impulse behind it is obviously authentic.
The Dream and Other Poems, by John Masefield (12mo, 63 pages; Macmillan: $1.25). An old mood many times expressed in earlier poems runs through Masefield's new book. The old richness and mellowness are here too, but the poems seem slighter than those of the former volumes, and the metre is so unvaried and so balanced as to be very slightly soporific. Vision and interpretation have taken on a more sombre cast, but for all that Masefield has little to fear in competition with any other poet among either the older or the younger Georgians. It is only his own earlier works with which this new volume does not bear comparison.
