spite of all this, such a book as Heinrich Mann's Der Kopf has been widely read, and authors like Hauptmann and Schnitzler are as well known in Sweden as anywhere outside of Germany itself. The work of Emil Ludwig - who has been called 'the Lytton Strachey of Germany' - has plenty of admirers there, as have also the writings of German globe-trotters like Colin Ross. In general, Swedish readers are more interested in informative works from the Continent than in creative writing.

In 1924 an exhibition of German art was sent to Stockholm and was received there with great hospitality and friendly interest. During February of this year a reciprocal gesture was made by Swedish artists who sent a collection of their work to Germany, where it was exhibited in Hamburg, Lübeck, and Berlin. The opening of the exhibition in Hamburg was made a kind of international occasion, graced by the presence of the Swedish Ambassador, the Consul-General in Hamburg, a representative of the fine arts ministry from Berlin, and others. It included the work of such well-established artists of the older generation as Richard Bergh, Ander Zorn, Oscar Bjórek, and Bruno Liljefors, as well as of many younger postimpressionists. The Vossische Zeitung's reporter notes the prevalence among these latter of a command over severe and realistic form, and the reassertion of Northern ideals of clarity over certain alien influences.

Pierre Jeanneret reports in the Semaine Littéraire a conversation with Signor Ferrero in which he confesses that, like Mr. St. Loe Strachey, he has turned to fiction late in life, and, also like his English confrère, intends to make his novel the reconstruction of an important historical epoch. In this case it is the Rome of thirty years ago instead of the Paris of the late forties; but the canvas will be even broader than Mr. Strachey's. Though he is determined not to make general ideas his point of departure, 'I particularly want this long work,' says the author, 'to be a chronicle of the emotional and intellectual state of Rome at the end of the nineteenth century.'

If Signor Ferrero succeeds in his task, and he is not habituated to failure, his novel will be a broad, objective, epic piece of fiction in the old 'discredited' manner of Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert, not a subjectivist modern romance. 'In my opinion an author ought to let his characters reveal themselves by telling the reader what they do and say, instead of standing between the characters and the reader with his own explanations. Of course this method could be pushed too far and verge on out-and-out drama. In my book I shall describe the personalities of the characters who are already middle-aged at the beginning, so that their initial actions may be clear; but all the young characters I shall leave to their own devices, and let them take form and outline under the pressure of events.'

Anything more specific than this the learned novelist refuses to divulge, but when a lady who was present at the interview asked whether it would be a novel with a 'key' - a novel using actual men and women as characters under more or less transparent disguises-'the master answered only with a sly and perhaps ironic smile.'

Albertine disparue, by Marcel Proust. (A la recherche du temps perdu: Tome VII) Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française. 18 francs.

[Times Literary Supplement]

La Prisonnière ended with the flight of Albertine, who secretly packed her trunks and escaped from her jealous and tortured jailer. The new volume opens with the triumphant words in which Françoise announced that escape: 'Mademoiselle Albertine est partie!' Artistically it is far above its predecessor, without its maddening longueurs and trivialities. Trivialities there are indeed in it, but in general they are handled in the manner of the earlier Proust, which gives to each its subtle significance. Some of the opening passages- -a translation of which by Mr. Scott Moncrieff has already appeared in a review are as beautiful as anything Proust ever wrote. After the first period of grief, made keener by the piercing jealousy that was always one of the favorite themes of Proust, it appears that all will go well. Albertine will come back; there will be a wedding; the Rolls-Royce and the yacht she has coveted have been ordered. Then comes the fatal telegram: there has been a ridingaccident, Albertine is dead and will return no

more.

The sentiments of the lover who sets himself to work back over, to traverser en sens inverse, the course and the scenes of their association are chronicled with extraordinary fidelity. Seldom it is that a writer, even a great writer, has intellectual honesty enough to record the distractions, the absurd inconsistencies, which mingle with the purest and most whole-hearted grief and regret, as Proust does here. All this is painfully true to life. We can only trust that the impulses which prompt the lover to pry and spy, with the aid of paid agents, into the past existence of his vicious mistress are less so. Thenceforward the theme becomes more and more gloomy. There are delightful passages none more so than that describing the author who sees his first article in print and sets himself to read it as if he were, first of all, certain of his friends, then 'the general reader.' But, one and all, the chief personages whom we have known are dragged down to the world of Sodome et Gomorrhe. Not even Robert de Saint-Loup, perhaps the most charming of them all, and now married to Gilberte Swann, the hero's love of early days, escapes. We are

led by our guide to look upon a Hades of perversion, wherein we find all the beautiful jeunes filles en fleurs and the most attractive of the men. We weary of their orgies because we do not believe in them.

Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. London: Chatto and Windus; New York: The Viking Press. $2.00.

[Observer]

THIS is the sort of book which, after a quick, ecstatic reading, one is on fire to recommend to one's friends, and it is only after a second reading that one begins to worry lest they will find the opening hundred pages dull and so not persevere until Aunt Lolly gets to Great Mop, becomes a witch, and gives Miss Warner the chance to write prose of a beauty as pure, as delicate, and as sensitive as Mr. De La Mare's. It really was a pity that Miss Warner should have wasted so much time in describing the early life of Aunt Lolly, her childhood in the country, her middle-age in Apsley Terrace with her brother and his family, for it is only when Aunt Lolly breaks free from her family and goes down to the village of Great Mop in Buckinghamshire, drawn there as though by the faint silver notes of dream-music, that the loveliness of the story bursts fully out.

Aunt Lolly is happy among the beech-woods of Great Mop, happy in her solitude, happy in the knowledge that an obscure, inexplicable something has been added to her. But Aunt Lolly is not allowed to remain long alone, and soon her nephew Titus, a charming young man from Oxford, comes down to stay near his aunt and write a book. Aunt Lolly is terrified that he will ruin Great Mop for her, and in her anguish she calls on Satan to save her, and Satan, kind, grave, and understanding, does not fail her. He makes her a witch, gives her a kitten as a familiar, curdles the milk Titus keeps for his nightly Ovaltine, makes him cut his hand and fall down in a wasps' nest, engages him off to a nice girl, and sends him back to London. Aunt Lolly is left in peace: she has become a witch, and she is content, for to be a witch, as she tells Satan one day as he lounges beside her on the grass disguised as a gardener, is 'to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others. ..

Miss Warner continually reminds one of Mr.

De La Mare, but she has a greater sense of humor, and her human beings are more natural, more of this world than his. At the same time, she shares with him that gift for weaving a story out of a delicate, transparent material which, although it makes a complete pattern in itself, yet gives glimpses of another, stranger, and yet more entrancing pattern behind. Lolly Willowes is a very beautiful book.

Poems in One Volume, by J. C. Squire. London: William Heinemann. 8s. 6d.

[Observer]

It is a real test of a poet's quality to have the bulk of his work gathered in one volume: one is forced then to dwell, not on the merits of particular poems, but on the character, the vision, and the philosophy of the poet. Mr. Squire's work bears the test very well. If one reads the volume through, -we must deprecate its unchronological arrangement and its rather overcrowded printing, - 8 genuine personality emerges. Enemies might urge a certain monotony of thought against Mr. Squire; but, unless in dramatic poetry, similarity of thought accompanies conviction of mind and individuality of creed, and Mr. Squire varies remarkably the statement of his belief. He himself recognizes that his thought is essentially unchanged in the twenty years covered by the work in this volume:

I have not changed. Even now I am stol'n away

In lulls of this life's warfare by a ray,
A hue on mist, a pebble on the shore.
And sudden detached at moments from the

roar

In street or hall I hear the gray waves' knell, 'Hopeless, Foredone, O whither? and Farewell!'

He is occupied with the great things in life, with the changing shapes of life's toys, and certain of their passing, even of the most immemorial. Yet he sees the world as a brave show, and the games in it as fine games. So in 'The Lily of Madrid,' in 'Birds,' in 'Rivers,' in 'Niagara,' in 'Ode: In a Restaurant,' and in many shorter poems, he sings of the shadows of reality, the images that prevent or reveal or occlude truth according to the faith and imagination of the looker-on.

Most distinctive of Mr. Squire's qualities as a poet is, perhaps, a certain high and righteous indignation. He can be poetically and admirably angry, as in that fierce poem, "The Survival of the Fittest'; and he can move from

EVERYTHING the United States can touch turns to gold - hence the title of Mr. C. H. Bretherton's contribution to a series of little books on the problems of to-day and to-morrow that has given a new lease of life to the pamphlet, that longdisused literary form. Mr. Bretherton, who has lived too long in the United States to be able to reproduce the rapturous impression of the English tourist 'streaking' through that vast country, does not resemble the woman rimester who wrote:

I hate washing dirty plates.

I hate the United States.

He sees, however, that the Midas touch has been turning all the really precious things in America into ready cash, that the arts- including that vital art of conduct called morality

are despised and neglected there, that the whole huge, opulent land is in danger of becoming 'a gigantic Babbitt Warren.' His book is full of astute observations and acute reflections.

"The truth is,' he observes, having the firsthand evidence to prove his point, 'that the modern American has no use for liberty, and liberty plays no part in what he conceives to be democracy. He conspues the imaginary tyranny of kings and emperors, but earnestly desires to replace it with the very real tyranny of the fifty-one per cent.' He explains the futility of American letters by the fact - so obvious as to be hitherto overlooked — that Americans write one language but speak another. The vision of the American future is even far overcrowded and obscure, but the substitution — which he foresees of the competitively selected lifeappointee for the politician will give the sane American a chance of asserting himself. Then progress, other than that based on the cash register, will become possible. Americans possessed of a 'think-tank' will find this wise and witty pamphlet a provocation to the thought that is creative.

The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh: 1879-1922, edited by Lady Raleigh. 2 vols. New York: The Macmillan Company. $7.00.

'A RESPECTABLE romantic' is the phrase that perhaps best describes the late Walter Raleigh, Professor of English successively at Liverpool, Glasgow, and Oxford. His academic and literary career kept him from ever breaking over the traces too obstreperously, and he wrote a series of perfectly dignified books of literary criticism. Yet he remained at heart a kind of bad boy among the bigwigs, and neither had nor professed to have too much reverence for scholars, universities, or books themselves. These letters have the sort of tang in the expression of opinion and the judgment of personalities that one would expect even from his formal studies. Like practically all modern letters, they are in no sense 'composed'; they are extravagant telegrams rather than letters, and must be read as such. On these terms a reader can be promised a great deal of humor, wisdom, and half-freakish merrymaking, as well as not a little of this kind of thing: 'There are limits to the process of combining one's own amusement with other people's instruction.'

Whom God Hath Sundered, by Oliver Onions. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1925. $2.50.

THE task of joining three more or less unrelated novels into one cannot be an easy one. Mr. Onions has here linked his most famous works, In Accordance with the Evidence, The Debit Account, and The Story of Louie, into a remarkably interesting and unified whole. The novel that results is long but seldom tedious. If one were anxious to criticize the small weaknesses of characterization, one might say that his treatment of Louie, the heroine, is at times sentimental and oversympathetic. In regard to plot, one is justified in complaining of the ease with which Mr. Onions kills off the three significant characters. But looking at the novel as an entity, one must admire the skillfully arranged plan of incident and the extraordinary feeling of the author for all the little and apparently unimportant bonds that hold the story and characters together.

The Origin of the Next War, by John Bakeless. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1926. $2.50.

THIS clever and readable little book was written by the former editor of the 'Life, Letters, and the Arts' department of the Living Age, and we suspect that it releases the pent-up political ideas of an ardent young Reserve officer which were suppressed during his exclusive devotion on our journal to the Muses instead of to Mars and the Erinyes, or whatever other deities just now preside over the councils of the Geneva diplomats. It relates in a competent and interesting way how and why the wars of recent years have come to pass, with considerable stress upon the persistence of their causes into the present era; but whether in order that we may save our souls by strengthening things that make for peace, or our skins by perfecting gas-masks and other methods of defense, it is a little difficult to say. It is written in apparent obliviousness, however, of the imponderables that make the world of to-day an entirely different world from that of twenty years ago, and that promise to give us a period of international, if not social, quiescence quite as long as or longer than the forty years of relative peace that intervened between the Napoleonic and the Crimean Wars.

Three Kingdoms, by Storm Jameson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.50.

FOR Americans who think that the English are a race entirely different from themselves this book will serve as a revelation. It is the story of an English girl who tried to combine love, motherhood, and advertising. Certain scenes in the divorce court and office building make us feel, with some resentment perhaps, that the English, after all, are our brothers. They too are not above loving money and other men's wives. Miss Jameson's treatment of her subject is remarkable for its frankness and ease. At times her sympathy for her characters clouds her judgment a little and leads her into sentimentality. In this country, where there are too many books of this matrimonial nature, Three Kingdoms, in spite of its merits, cannot be expected to keep its head above the waters of the commonplace.