tions and structure of his book. It would be on such minor matters as, say, his belittlement of Poe, and on a too consistent emphasis of praise, for so many high lights run into one another inadvertently do Mr. De La Mare an injustice. Of course, the instant retort to this is: if Mr. Megroz did not think an awful lot of Mr. De La Mare, he would not write a book about him. But the book is not called "An Appreciation"; it is called a "Critical Study".

Now Mr. De La Mare does have certain failings. He is not to be depended upon as a revealer of the world, and the very greatest poets have always revealed the world to itself. His failure lies in an inability to adjust himself to normal things and to understand that the high imaginative faculties do not always need the abnormalities of existence for their proper food. While one may adore them and give full-hearted assent to the art with which they are invoked, it is not representational to insist continually on symbolical monkeys, queer midgets existing in an atmosphere of evil, and such monstrosities of life as Miss Duveen, Seaton's Aunt, and some of the other figures in The Riddle. None of these things are to be decried as a part of Mr. De La Mare's art, for they have their place and Mr. De La Mare would not be Mr. De La Mare if he did not immerse himself in their curious and crazy moonlight. But their very existence as so great a part of the writer's expression removes him from that high category in which we place Donne, Coleridge, Goethe, and Shelley, to name but a few who have touched that mysterious borderland of dreams in their poetry. In other words, Mr. De La Mare lacks that breadth that is a necessary quality of real greatness. If it were not for that unremitting naïveté of childhood and an inborn ethical perception, Mr. De La Mare might be admitted to that astonishing group that includes Poe and Charles Baudelaire. This looks very much as though Mr. De La Mare were being indirectly called a decadent writer but, of course, this is not so. It is enough, perhaps, to affirm that he sometimes employs the implements of decadence to achieve his own ends.

Primarily he is the child-imagination coloring a mature attitude toward life. And this attitude is revealed through a subtle perfection of rhythm and a dream-like atmospheric veil that Mr.

Megroz does very well to extol. There are few poets living today with his technical equipment, and in at least one poem, The Listeners, he has evolved a method of writing that is quite unique and which has brought a new element into English poetry. It is a system based upon delicate stresses in which lines of varying syllables have identical values. Indeed, it is more than this, for it is to be doubted that any other writer could handle it quite so superbly. One would need to possess Mr. De La Mare's personality, his way of looking at things, his sensitivity of reaction, his individual turns of phrase. Therefore being so unique Mr. De La Mare affords any critic more than an opportunity to reveal a man and his work; he affords him the subject-matter for a consideration of the poetical perception and its distinctly original application in a time when most new things turn out to be no more than readjustments of the old. It is because of this, and because of Mr. Megroz's frankly psychoanalytical approach, that such chapters in his book as "Poetry as Dream" and "Psychology of Dream" become of more than personal interest.

HERBERT S. GORMAN.

SOME PHILOSOPHERS IN FICTION

A PASSAGE TO INDIA. By E. M. Forster. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

ARNOLD WATERLOW. By May Sinclair. New York: The Macmillan Com

pany.

THE NEEDLE'S EYE. By Arthur Train. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

CHRIS GASCOYNE. By A. C. Benson. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.

THE RED RIDERS. By Thomas Nelson Page. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

My profound conviction is that every writer of fiction who is worth his salt must be in his way, humble or great, a bit of a philosopher, and this justifies me, I think, in grouping under my title a number of writers who resemble one another only in their prestige. Personally I am not so insistent on the nature of the philosophy as on the need of its presence. It may very well be a

no-philosophy, like Joseph Conrad's, or a worse-than-no philosophy, like Thomas Hardy's. These are consistent with the glory of literary illumination, and with the power of literature. Pseudophilosophy, spiritual melodramatics, and the realist's too common affectation of having no point of view, of being as impartial as God and as unassuming as a bit of clay-these are not.

All the writers about to be considered have added something to the sum of feeling; they have imparted a point of view; they have written humanly of human beings, without any idle pretense of not being themselves a part of the endless stream of life. And so they are all philosophers, giving, or trying to give us, something to think by and to live by.

It is a curious fact that Mr. Forster could scarcely have written so effectively (and so impartially) about the futility of attempts at social rapprochement between English people and natives of India, if he had not had as the background of his thought the possible futility of all life. Perhaps no other writer since Montaigne has so acutely realized the "imbecility" of human intellect. But for this he must have written some sort of propaganda. But he has avoided the too sharp issues of the controversialist because he realizes that we all live after all in a kind of stupor: we pretend that we are wide awake all the time, acutely aware, though really we have been half asleep. So all but the most fortunate blunder through life.

In India these things are emphasized. "Mrs. Moore had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time-the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved a spiritual muddledom for which no high-sounding words can be found: we can neither act nor refrain from acting, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity." As for our ennobling dreams, our mystic insights: "Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but wait till you get one, dear reader!"

One thing is perfectly clear: a man who writes in this strain cannot write as a partizan.

Yet Mr. Forster is anything but depressing. He is the tonic satirist, the philosopher possessed with the comic spirit. Though he sometimes makes the ground gape under our feet or cleaves

right to the center of our consciousness with a phrase, his is not the manner of the tragedian. He does not really seek to terrify. Instead of making his satire unendurable, his philosophy makes it kindly for are not all of us too human? So we are amused— amused by the ineptitudes of the well-intentioned Abdul Aziz, amused by the frustration of the honest-minded, flat-breasted Miss Quested, amused by the officialdom of the "Burtons and Turtons"-amused and made sympathetic. We enjoy it all like gods, and yet we are not required to strain our minds above the common pitch of nobility.

Unsparing but never cruel, and admirably free from the vice of preaching the "spirit" of a land as if it were a kind of black gospel (as if one must be a materialist because life is gross in mid-Africa, or a mystic because the desert appears to the observer to be limitless!), Mr. Forster is at once a philosopher, a humanist, and a wit-and hence that complex creature, a novelist!

His wit is unconscionable, but never unkind or atrocious. What other English writer would have dared to make one of his characters think, as Mr. Forster does,-it was the thought of Miss Quested on the eve of the trial in which she was to testify against Aziz,—“God, who saves the King, will surely support the police"? What militant skeptic has said a more shocking thing than Mr. Forster's (quite accidental) remark about "poor talkative Christianity"? Yet this does not offend; it is all in the picture— a picture irresistibly true. None would wish it incomplete in the least touch.

From his skeptical point of view-with kindness, with impartiality, without solemnity or derision-Mr. Forster gives us a lively, critical view of one portion of British India. The romantic view, as well as the critical view, has its place no doubt, and surely it is a waste of breath at this time to inveigh against romance. But if Kipling has shown us India as a pageant, full of picturesque figures, human enough, yet incomplete, after the fashion of romance, Forster has convinced us, and has proved that the destruction of illusions may be neither a base nor an uninteresting business. Like Chekov, best of realists, he sees not only people's motives, but the very wrinkles in their consciousness. Yet, unlike Chekov, he is always the artist, never the diagnostician. He

scarcely approaches the borders of pathology, physical or spiritual. Always he keeps within our range—well within the range of conceivable human interests and passions. And when he is subtlest, he is clearest.

The baffling misunderstandings that enter into all human relations, and especially those between numbers of alien races! No sermon can be preached about them. No clear lesson can be drawn from them. They are too complex, too subtle, and too true! Before the pluralism of life, we are very likely to stand amazed. Aziz says that the only cure is "kindness, kindness, and then more kindness"-or well, let us say, the millenium! Does Mr. Forster agree with Aziz? One does not know, but one cannot doubt that he has written an exceptional novel-a novel in which all is clear as daylight, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is said as any one else would say it or from the point of view of any common observer. This novel is one of the great literary victories over the inherent commonplaceness of words-a triumphant escape from the stereotyped.

Mr. Forster (besides knowing India) is certainly a master of our astringent modern comedy-a comedy that excludes alike the savagery of the satirist and the wistfulness of the half-repentant skeptic. To be so terrible a philosopher, yet never to boast of it or parade it, or half withdraw it, but to use one's comic spirit zestfully in the criticism of life, is no small thing.

As has been said, one does not suspect Mr. Forster of being a partizan or even of having a "message". One does begin to suspect Miss Sinclair of having a message, but alas! what is it? I for one cannot surely say, except that it is all about sex and God!

In two novels-Arnold Waterlow, recently published, and the earlier Mary Olivier-Miss Sinclair has told us essentially the same things. She has told us how a child grew up, and she has told us of the passionate love affairs of the grown-up child, and she has told us of the finding of God through a certain mystical process. First there is a sympathetic (and somewhat Freudian) account of childhood, then there is consuming passion, and finally, at the magic age of forty or thereabout, there is mysticism and victory.

We begin with Arnold Waterlow's childhood-distinctly de