Sous le soleil de Satan, by Georges Bernanos. Paris: Plon, 1926. 10 francs.

[E. Jaloux in Les Nouvelles Littéraires] THIS Volume is, I believe, the first novel that has been written about sainthood - the first real novel, I mean, not just a literary biography couched in more or less novelistic terms, such as Huysmans's Sainte Lydvinne de Schiedam. And anyone who considers for a moment the difficulty of the undertaking will be surprised to find that M. Bernanos has almost succeeded. Sous le soleil de Satan is significant in this sense, that it is consistently admirable in those passages one would suppose to have been almost impossible to write, and mediocre in passages that one would have supposed to be very easy. The main thing to keep in mind is that sainthood does exist, and that to smile at it or to deny it would be the same as to have no belief in genius simply because one has not happened to know Dante or Goethe. But to understand what constitutes it is no easy matter; it is absolutely necessary to get at the central phenomenon that recurs in the personalities of all saints. Now I believe no competent person will contradict me when I say that M. Bernanos has made this central phenomenon as clear and as comprehensible as anyone could make it without being himself a saintor at least without being one yet, since of course no one can foretell the future, and for the moment I assume that M. Bernanos is no saint on the ground that he writes novels.

La Présentation des Haïdoucs, by Panaft Istrati. Paris: Rieder et Compagnie, 1926.

[Semaine Littéraire]

MR. PANAIT ISTRATI, the Rumanian romancer, is now a 'made' author; his works have been translated into ten languages, and an increasing number of readers wait impatiently for his new books. The truth is that Mr. Istrati has not only, as a foreigner writing our language, reproduced in France the 'miracle of Conrad' in England, but has rejuvenated a genre that was beginning to disappear from our literature-the genre of the pure narrative, where the story is of first importance and where 'setting' and 'psychology' play second fiddle. And in spite of everything Mr. Istrati has brought us back to the novel of adventure; his stories, in addition to their brevity, have an indefinable legendary savor and a deli

cacy of line that put them in an intermediate class that is almost unknown in our language.

The fictitious narrator, Adrien Zograffi, after having told us of Kyra Kyralina and of his family in a narrative full of warm Oriental coloring, then of Uncle Anghel, now introduces us to the Haïdoucs, who are chivalrous and justiceloving brigands living in the mountains of Rumania -outlawed protectors of the oppressed. Each of the Haïdoucs rises and tells his story. Unfortunately there is a good deal of similarity in these tales, and the result is a little monotonous. There is also a respectable number of outraged women and a certain abuse of untranslatable Rumanian expressions that give his pages the typographical appearance of some translations from the Russian. We should point out, on the other hand, a very marked improvement in the French.

Laudin und die Seinen, by Jakob Wassermann. Berlin: S. Fischer.

[Times Literary Supplement]

HERR WASSERMANN, who is known to English and American readers by a number of novels of German social life, - above all by his Goose-man, - might well have called his latest novel, Laudin und die Seinen, simply Marriage. For the problems of married life, the validity and value of the institution of marriage itself, are the book's sole theme. Herr Friedrich Laudin was a typical member of the German professional class, a successful barrister in the prime of life, who had managed after the war to maintain his reputation, gained round about 1910, as an able advocate who specialized in divorce questions. His constant touch with these marriage problems gradually brings him 'up against' his own position. He is a respectable married man, and has two daughters in their teens and a younger son; while his wife, Pia, is a devoted creature, but with not much outlook beyond her home and her children. Laudin little by little drifts away from Seinen, from his own circle, and gets enmeshed with a well-known actress, Lulu Dercum, on whose account the youthful son of his friend Fraundofer had shot himself. This part of the story and the comments of Laudin's daughters on the fatal episode incidentally shed an interesting light on German youth and the 'child-suicides' with which the German press used to preocccupy itself so much. How Laudin gradually falls under

Lulu Dercum's influence, how she extracts money from him by her sexual wiles and leads him into most undesirable society this far from original plot is skillfully unfolded against a background of other wrecked marriages. The dénouement is rather weak. Pia gives her husband his freedom, and, liberated from the formal compulsion of marriage, Laudin finds the way back to 'his own.' As an interpretation of the problem of marriage the novel is disappointing; as a representation of events in a typical marriage it succeeds by reason of Herr Wassermann's excellent command of realistic but not excessively naturalistic prose.

Fathers of the Revolution, by Philip Guedalla. London: John Murray; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $5.00.

[Sunday Times]

MR. PHILIP GUEDALLA, who has been hailed by Sir Edmund Gosse as 'the paladin to whom we look to deliver us from the dragon of historical dreariness,' is in the Macaulay tradition. He handles history imaginatively-recreates incident and character, instead of merely preserving them in his pages as fossils are preserved in a museum, and adds to a picturesque narrative style piquant satirical and epigrammatic gifts and a skill in the use of antithesis that remind one of the caustic wit and irony of Junius. Now and then his satire and epigram · as when he writes, 'Few persons, if one excepts the writers of historical plays, have failed to notice the dramatic qualities of history'. are forced and mechanical and have no bite to their bark; but as a rule, to mix the metaphor, they have a lightning brilliance, and there is potence in the flash of them. His Fathers of the Revolution is no formal history of the War of Independence, but goes behind the event to reveal its inner significance in a series of character studies of the more or less famous personages who were responsible, intentionally or unintentionally, for the foundation of the United States of America.

Man is the only animal that makes gods, says Mr. Guedalla, and 'of all the gods which man has ever made the most singular are those which he makes out of other men.' There are no gods in Mr. Guedalla's gallery except George Washington and, perhaps, Lafayette, for neither Burke nor Chatham has ever quite been deified, and it is in no spirit of iconoclasm that he robs Washington of something of his godhood in order to make something more of a man of him. "The father of his country has,' in Mr. Guedalla's

opinion, 'been deprived of his identity by his grateful children.'

He was encrusted with moral tales which equally repel belief and admiration; his noble figure was draped in the heavy folds of those Teutonic virtues which the Anglo-Saxon imagination erroneously attributes to the Romans. He saved, in a military sense he made, the Revolution; and its happy heirs have repaid him with a withered nosegay of schoolgirl virtues. Misconceived panegyric has made him almost ridiculous; and chivalry dictates his rescue from the dull swarms of commonplace with which he has been belittled. Having reestablished Washington as a human being, Mr. Guedalla notes that 'at his burial there were three volleys and a salvo of guns. But, with an informality that must seem curious in such a case, he never lay in state. The omission has been abundantly repaired; and it is his tragedy that his reputation has been lying in state ever since.'

Lafayette does not come through his biographer's hands so successfully. He emerges shorn of his beams and figuring as the sort of knighterrant who belongs to musical comedy. But one is a little reluctant to let him go at that. He may have been actuated more by hatred of England and a desire to benefit his own country than by love for America, but there is a certain idealism and gallantry about the youthful adventurer that atones for his vanities. He had his foolish side (who has not?), and after the Declaration of Independence wanted to swagger before George III in an American uniform; but even the fact that Shakespeare angled for a coat of arms takes nothing from the real value of his achievement.

The ablest, most sympathetic, of these portraits are of George III and Benjamin Franklin. Admirable, too, are the deft sketches of Burgoyne and Cornwallis, whom Mr. Guedalla commends to America as worthy of statues in her public places, for 'did they not lose the war and found the United States?' As you gather from the devastating 'Footnote on Greatness' which supplements the essays, Mr. Guedalla is no extremist in the matter of hero-worship, but leaves himself wondering about Great Men, 'there used to be so many of them,' and thinks the greatness of the Great Man 'seems to become still more dubious if one watches him in action.' Here you watch him in action, and find that Mr. Guedalla takes nothing away from history except its dullness, and, at worst, simply humanizes our heroes by giving them their proper hats in exchange for their halos.

Rosa, by Knut Hamsun. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. $2.50.

THIS latest novel by Mr. Hamsun deals once more with fields and characters that his readers already know well. Here again are the Norwegian village of Lofoten; Benoni Hartvigsen, vain and morose; the great trader Mack, a tsar and a despot; and the fish nets drying in the clear cold Northern sunlight. The dominant character of Rosa alone strikes a note of warmth and cheer. The novel, if such it may be considered, has little or no plot, and might better be called a journal. The dreariness of character and landscape, the fatalism and weariness of life, may well depress the reader. Withal the book has a fascination exactly as the Growth of the Soil had. Perhaps it rests on its exotic appeal, perhaps on the consistency of its grimness - more probably on the feeling of a strength and vigor, physical and mental, that rise insurmountable and shows the very core of a hardy and stalwart race.

A Brazilian Tenement, by Aluisio Azevedo Translated from the Portuguese by Harry W. Brown. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1926. $3.00.

THIS story, by one of Latin America's greatest realists, is a chapter from life in a sunny cottageclose of Rio de Janeiro, where white and black, laborer, laundress, demimondaine, and decayed gentlewoman mingle on terms of social equality, and where sordid vice and primitive passion flourish in tropical luxuriance without stifling a spirit of cheery mutual helpfulness and human brotherhood. Interwoven with the dispersed plot is a portrayal of the relationship between native and immigrant, race and race, and climate and character, in a West of Suez quite as untrammeled by our conventions as any place east of that famous moral boundary. Altogether a worth-while book, with a sort of photographic veracity that adds to the fascination of its exotic and vivid coloring.

Adam's Breed, by Radclyffe Hall. Garden City:

Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926. $2.50. THAT human conduct is as thoroughly determined as any other natural phenomenon by hereditary and environmental influences is the basic idea of this chronicle of a man's life from birth to a tragic but glorious end an idea that is worked out with perfect inevitability. Gian

Luca, an Italian born in London, whose paternity remains unknown and who consequently goes through life without a name, living in a group of Italian émigrés in Compton Street, sets forth on successive quests for love, for beauty, for success, for a country, and at last for God. The somewhat novel theme is food. The little Italian clan makes its livelihood dispensing food. In Gian-Luca's earliest recollections are the enticing odors of his grandfather's delicatessen shop. The faithful and boastful Mario, waiter in a thirdrate restaurant, initiates him into the profession. An important and impressive character is Millo, the proud proprietor of the fashionable 'Doric' where Gian-Luca achieves notable success as head waiter. But most impressive of all is the hard, capable old grandmother, Theresa, forever embittered against Gian-Luca because his advent meant disgrace and death for her beloved Olga, but brought at last to make a fetish of her macaroni machine. A study in the disillusionment of a sensitive and compassionate soul, the sadness of which is tempered by art, for Radclyffe Hall, an English woman-novelist, new to America, is undeniably an artist.

The Verdict of Bridlegoose, by Llewelyn Powys. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926. $2.50.

WHY Mr. Powys should 'put on the mantle' - as the jacket says - of Rabelais's Bridlegoose in order to deliver his verdict on our long-suffering civilization is not entirely clear from his book; that excellent jurist was represented as (a) advanced in years, (b) simple, and (c) devoted to a rigorous administration of justice - no one of which epithets describes Mr. Powys with any special felicity. He is indeed quite unmistakably middle-aged; he is simple only within the limits permitted a writer for the Dial; and his justice is tempered, if not by mercy, at least by a feeling for the picturesque, the sententious, and the savory. His record of years spent in New York, on the Pacific Coast, and in the Rockies is a little too hospitable to the trivial which only memorialists of genius know how to use tellingly

to impose itself as a first-rate pronouncement on America. Nevertheless, Mr. Powys has the sort of second-rate sensitive mind' that apprehends a good many things unapparent to a hasty eye, and a certain coherent picture does, as a result, emerge from his fluent pages.

THE BRITISH LIBERAL SPLIT

BRUSHING personalities aside, although they have much to do with present dissensions in the British Liberal Party, the enduring and historically important aspect of the breach between Lord Oxford and Lloyd George is their respective attitudes toward the present industrial conflict in Great Britain. The Liberals are suffering the pains and penalties of every Centrist Party. One wing sympathizes with the Conservatives, the other with Labor. Neither wing, however, would go as far toward Conservatism or Radicalism as the Party toward which it leans. When a great issue like the general strike comes up, these diverging inclinations are sure to assert themselves. We suspect that Lloyd George has not lost out in the present controversy, precisely because the Conservative Government, with which Lord Oxford and Lord Grey have virtually aligned themselves, has found no solution for the existing crisis. The Conservative Liberals have run the risk, therefore, of associating themselves with failure, while Lloyd George and his followers

have at least a gambler's chance of winning credit from the mischances of their opponents and of posing at some future time as the true prophets of Liberalism. The Nation and the Athenæum and the Manchester Guardian have sided with the Welsh ex-Premier; the Westminster Gazette has stood by Lord Oxford. The Conservatives are watching the fray with cynical delight. As the Saturday Review observes, it affords 'analluring distraction' in Britain's present gloom, and Liberal dissensions are the one 'stable element in contemporary political life.' The New Statesman says: 'Mr. Lloyd George has enormously strengthened his position in the country with the policy he has pursued during the strike'; and the Nation and Athenæum exclaims: 'Who would have believed that in a controversy between these two statesmen Mr. Lloyd George would be triumphantly and unmistakably in the right?' More striking still, the weekly leader writer of the Sunday Times, which one would hardly rank as a Liberal organ, comes to Lloyd George's defense with the following keen analysis of the two leaders:

'Mr. Lloyd George has great faults. He has many Liberal instincts, but no anchorage in Liberal principles; he is constitutionally and by nature an intriguer, he is slapdash in his mental processes, a very bad judge of men, a despiser of learning and scholarship, and, true Celt that he is, a lover of those short cuts to the Millennium which no true Anglo-Saxon ever believes in. He is not, contrary to the general belief, a good tactician, for he is alternately cautious to timidity and a reckless plunger.

'But when you have enumerated all his faults, the genius is still there, shining the brighter against a dark background. He is the only Liberal for many years that has shown any fertility in ideas or real driving power. Lord Oxford's Liberalism is an attitude of mind; Mr. Lloyd George's a desire to get certain things done. All sorts of people have tried to use him. No one has succeeded, and Mr. Lloyd. George remains himself, the unsolved and insoluble equation in politics. These things have to be paid for, and a little insubordination to titular leaders is not too high a price. On the practical side of Liberal politics, he has accomplished far more than ever Gladstone did. Lord Oxford would have been well advised to give him his head and to look the other way from inevitable indiscretions, while prepared to annex any political capital that he might accumulate for the Party. The sensible old Whigs in the Party always did that with the Radicals.

'It is sad to the sentimentalist to think of a great historical English Party becoming a sort of frozen moon in the firmament, but that is how events seem to be shaping themselves. But there might be consolations if you got a Labor Party revivified with a few constructive ideas grown at home, not imported from Germany, and a trade

unionist movement that thought less of taking as much as possible out of the common stock and more of increasing the common stock. Both the virtues and the faults of Mr. Lloyd George might fit him for this service - a greater national service than he rendered even during the war. He will choose his time, but he will sooner or later, one is convinced, make the attempt, and, if he does, his chances of success are good. Not land again, but trade-unionism in its relations to the problems of industry, is his chance.'

TORIES BOOST RUSSIA

FOUR Conservative members of Parliament who have recently returned from an unofficial visit to Russia have published a report which the equally Conservative London Daily Telegraph characterizes as including 'favorable judgments in most curious and striking contrast with the official reports published from time to time by the organs of the Soviet Government.' For example, they say, 'Russia's present financial policy is sound and almost austere,' and declare that 'not a single foreign trade commitment since the introduction of the present régime has failed to be punctually honored'; and they conclude that 'Russia is capable of presenting a great field for judicious investment of British capital.'

It is quite natural that the Daily Telegraph should differ from these findings of its deluded Party comrades by 180 degrees and it would go still further if geometry permitted. The report, which is about ten thousand words long, characterizes the present régime as stable and likely to stay, and recommends a fourfold British objective with regard to Russia: (a) to check and ultimately to stop anti