knew the theatre backwards and forwards. His sense of stage effect was keen and intuitive; and he knew a subtler and deeper secret: how to make music speak with dramatic veracity and point.

At the end, this buffon odieux (as Boileau called him)—this rake, knave, intriguer, who had lifted himself out of the obscurity of his Italian origin into a position where he talked back to a King, -died of an abscess of the toe.

To the very last he was unscrupulous, for (according to a story told immediately after his death) he cheated to obtain absolution. His confessor, so runs the tale, required as a condition that Lully destroy all he had written on his new opera, Achille et Polyxène. Lully gave the abhorred score to the confessor, who triumphantly cast it into the flames. "What, Baptiste!" remonstrated a prince who visited Lully, "you have destroyed your opera?" "Gently, Sir," whispered the dying rascal: "I had another copy." So he died, radiant, corrupt, and unashamed: and his epitaph in the Church of Saint-Pères declares that "God gave him

a truly Christian patience in the sharp pain of his last illness after having received the Sacraments with resignation and edifying piety." Romain Rolland does not neglect to make allowance for "his multiple soul", and declares that "Lully's work in art was, like classic tragedy and the noble gardens of Versailles, a monument of that vigorous age which was the summer of our race;" for Lully, the Florentine immigrant, had made himself "the Frenchest Frenchman of his time".

The point to insist upon, in the interest of clear-headedness and philosophical rectitude, is that this unlovable reprobate—hard, mean, spiritually unclean-could write the marvellously lovely "Nocturne" in Le Triomphe de l'Amour, music full of gentleness and magic: of tenderness, poetry, dreams.

It is of course a mystery. But since the activities of the artist are incalculable anyway, why should we wonder over this most insoluble mystery of all-the spectacle of sinful human clay yielding immortal loveliness?

LAWRENCE GILMAN.

THE BOOK OF THE MONTH

JEWELLED MELODRAMA1

BY LAWRENCE GILMAN

"THERE's nothing very interesting about me," said Miss Rebecca West not long ago in a short biographical account of herself. Aside from the fact that Miss West is young, mysterious, pulchritudinous, and writes the most vividly beautiful English prose of her day, there is perhaps, as she remarked, nothing very interesting about her. Yet it is a little discouraging to find so passionately ruthless a truth-seeker and truth-speaker as Miss West indulging herself in that kind of simpering self-deprecation. It is even more discouraging to find that the sanctity of words means so little to her. For surely Rebecca West is the last person in the world from whom one would have expected that kind of trivial and irritating disingenuousness. Evidently the words she used meant nothing to her. She was willing to prostitute them—to use them as the coin of inexactness and inveracity -as regardlessly as if she had been one of those fictional sentimentalists whom she so pungently despises. One remembers Alice in Wonderland: "Important". your Majesty means "Unimportant". But one did not expect Miss West to talk like a passage out of the Trial Scene in Alice in Wonderland. How exhilarating, how much more in character, it would have been if she had put it just the other way: "There's a good deal that is interesting about me [she might even have said "very"]". For consider her own statement of the case. Her father, she says, was EnglishGarrison-Irish, from County Kerry. Her mother was Scotch. Her maternal grandfather was musical director of the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, and a friend of Charles Kean and the Kembles and Charlotte Cushman. Rebecca West went to London at seventeen, tried to act, "but got the sack" for reading Creative 1The Judge. By Rebecca West. New York: George H. Doran Company.

...

Evolution during a rehearsal. At eighteen she began to write articles for the London weeklies (her first poems were published when she was twelve). She wrote for The Freewoman, The Clarion, The Daily News. She now writes as literary critic of The New Statesman, where she says what she pleases, as she pleases. "Mr.

[she wrote not long ago] has written another novel. How long, O Lord, how long?" (Only that.)

Six years ago she wrote a book about Henry James (published here and in England in the year of his death) that was so dazzling an accomplishment, as criticism and as writing, that it seems to have blinded every one who encountered it. For no one appears ever to have seen it. It fell quite flat, and has apparently vanished forever. "I concluded," Miss West has said, "that the book was not published at all, but quietly interred, and I have sometimes had a fancy to send a wreath for its grave." It was a book in which you might have read such passages as these:

With sentences vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids and a scene that would have made a site for a capitol, he set about constructing a story the size of a hen-house.

It is singularly free [The Ambassadors] from those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of The Golden Bowl with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.

When one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these people whether there was any palliation of their ugly circumstances, one finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of the meaning of Mr. James's novels, has been smashed up on this sea of phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood.

One perceives that the crystal bowl of Mr. James's art was not, as one had feared, broken. He had but gilded its clear sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-à-brac and tossed into it, with an increasing carelessness, any sort of object—a jewel, a rose, a bit of string, a visiting-card-confident that the surrounding glow would lend it beauty.

He split hairs until there were no longer any hairs to split, and his mental gesture became merely the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness.

Criticism must break down when it comes to masterpieces.

One

can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. About this masterpiece, too [The Wings

of the Dove], nothing can be said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art.

No wonder such writing fell flat. It was the kind of prose that some uncompanioned delinquents had furtively dreamed of -a blend of wit and beauty, of the lightheartedness that dares to be allusively contemporaneous and sportive and audacious, and yet has no dread of loveliness; the kind of prose that some cosmic literary Burbank might have produced if he had made an æsthetico-horticultural home-brew out of Bernard Shaw and "A. E." But who wants such writing? We insist upon the Watertight Compartment in art. Would Mr. Strachey, for example, be so much read if he had ever dared to give his suave malice the lightning-like thrust of Rebecca West's devouring savagery?—if he had dared to alter his exquisite and gentlemanly charm of surface into the wickedly importunate beauty that irradiates almost every paragraph of Miss West's prose-now in a passionate intensity of human revelation, now in a shining loveliness of perfect imagery?

So Miss West's 109-page masterpiece on Henry James-which probed more deeply and rewardingly into his art than all the other commentaries combined-was stillborn. Nor was Miss West's next book-her novel, The Return of the Soldier-a success at all commensurate with what would have been, in an ideal community of letters, its extraordinary persuasiveness. But success, as Sir James Barrie recently observed, "has become a somewhat odious onion nowadays;" and it is conceivable that Miss West shares that view of it. Yet, after all, a writer does write to be read-not necessarily by that famous forty per cent of us who are morons, but by most of the other sixty per cent. Miss West would shudder as violently as did Bagehot in contemplation of "the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people". It is because she pleases so few, relatively speaking, of the superior,

that one is disposed to weep like Mark Twain over the grave of Adam, and despair of the future of his descendants.

We discussed in this place Miss West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier, when it appeared four years ago. It seemed to us then, as it still does, a superb performance, a novel of extraordinary and moving beauty, a work rich in achievement and in promise. And now she has done it again—more imposingly, in a way; with more sustained power; much less compactly; and, on the whole, disappointingly.

Miss West calls her new novel The Judge. It is a book of heroic proportions, of amazingly long breath. Half of its 483 pages are devoted to the introduction of two of its protagonists; the third, and the chief of them, comes on the scene only in the second part: this will give you the measure, the sweep and power,

of Miss West's stroke.

As a human drama, the thing is startlingly unreal. It is Victorian melodrama set to music-the music of an incomparable narrative style, orchestrated with gorgeous virtuosity. An innocent rural lass, the farmer's daughter, is seduced by the local aristocrat, the young Squire, and bears him a magnificent lovechild. In order to achieve that strange social distinction known as The Protection of his Name, she is officially and "decently' married to the Squire's butler. The bargain was for a wedding that should merely provide window-dressing for the disgraced damsel; but, as you will have guessed, the butler did not keep his word. The damsel, he must have thought, was fair game. And so there came another child, "legitimate" but detested. The proprieties were saved, and if poor Marion Yaverland, the "dark, silent, sledge-hammer of a woman", was turned into a flaming beacon of hate, why that, no doubt, was her own fault. Meanwhile, the Love-Child, Richard the Lion-Hearted, has grown up, has fallen in love with the winsome Ellen, a young Edinburgh suffragette, an adorable lass with a bright, shrewd, candid soul and a rich sense of comedy. Why they do not marry at once, since there is no evident reason why they shouldn't, is one of the baffling mysteries of this perturbing and engrossing tale. Instead, Miss West causes Richard's tragical mother to drown herself for fear that she stands in her son's way. Then