NEW BOOKS REVIEWED

HUNTINGTOWER. By John Buchan. New York: George H. Doran Company.

Mr. Buchan claims for his hero, Dickson McCunn, descent from Sir Walter's Nicol Jarvie. This genealogical whimsy is pleasant and one is disposed to accept it. The middle-aged, settled, conscientious, but romantic McCunn, who carries himself bravely through adventures much too savagely romantic for his taste, has indeed a spiritual kinship with the stout Bailie. But there is a difference. Nicol Jarvie is real, not because Scott took any particular pains to make him so, but because Scott in portraying such a type couldn't to save his soul get very far away from truth and nature. He would have been perfectly safe in making the Bailie dance a jig or stand on his head: the good Jarvie would still have been the Bailie. But Dickson McCunn, who is a carefully studied embodiment of commonplace, matter-of-fact, thoroughly real characteristics is by contrast a mere phantasm.

The contrast is fundamental; it begins with motives. The Bailie, it will be remembered left his warm fireside and engaged in a hair-brained adventure for a perfectly understandable reason, and when he was cornered, he fought -to good purpose and with a red-hot poker. The red-hot poker is what puts his reality beyond doubt. A red-hot poker is the weapon of a sensible, plucky man, outraged by the predicament in which he finds himself. Romance, and the poker, were forced upon the Bailie, and therefore we believe in them both. But Dickson McCunn sets out upon his adventures from a purely fictitious motive; he puts himself into an insanely dangerous predicament because the thing attracts him; and he assaults a friend and ally with a two-by-four, mistaking him for his arch enemy. One does not seriously believe in Mr. McCunn's motive; one doesn't believe in his youthful impetuosity and want of judgment; one does not believe in the two-by-four. Between Bailie Jarvie, sensibly defending himself with a red-hot poker, and Mr. McCunn madly swinging a two-by-four at the head of a stranger whom he had only the shallowest of reasons for supposing to be the villain of the play in which he himself was bravely trying to figure-between these two lies the whole continent of reality.

Walter Scott and his contemporaries and predecessors thought, rightly enough, that all young men desire to grow up, to become tall men of their hands, to do great deeds, and to win for themselves fame and fortune. He believed that "old men have grey beards, their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and they have a plentiful

lack of wit, together with most weak hams." Not a few modern writers appear to be most potently convinced that most young men are eccentric, prematurely old, a little wild in fancy, if not simply stodgy and self-centered, and generally weazened in mind; but that old men frequently cherish a secret desire to be poetical and romantic, to play the lover, to brandish lath swords and to ride hobby horses. There has been a serious upsetting of the great tradition. Proficiency in enhancing half-truths grows apace, and sophistry passes for originality in the realm of fiction.

What a world of pains our moderns take to set forth their brain-spun versions of reality with accuracy and finish! What gestures, what miraculous passes are made around the heads of these freakish, commonplace people who represent real human nature in an ordinary type of modern novel. Even Mr. Buchan, who is not extremely decadent, cannot let his McCunn alone. He slaps him on the back, calls him a good fellow, picks him up when he falls down, laughs at him, rearranges his clothes, and sets him on his way. He does not really leave him to his own devices for a moment; and he generally patronizes him and lets others patronize him. He does all this artfully and by implication, it is true; but still he does it. Scott, be it noted, really respected Nicol Jarvie. If he had not done so, the Bailie would not now seem to us somewhat more real than most of the characters in sober history.

Notwithstanding all this, Mr. Buchan has written an entertaining yarn, having something of the magic that S. R. Crockett (and others) used to wield, but the secret of which has been lost. The tale has not much originality, either of fable or of tone. The plot, which is about a persecuted Russian princess and a gang of ingeniously wicked Bolsheviki, might have been invented by E. Phillips Oppenheim; the adventurous, fighting parts might have been done by Crockett; Barrie might conceivably have amused himself with the "Gorbals Diehards" (those gamin boy scouts), and McCunn is treated somewhat as Arnold Bennett might treat him if that conscientious, amused realist allowed himself to be a trifle silly. But the story is told with gusto, and it is really amusing all the way through. It is thus to be preferred to all novels of the pseudo-serious type, and ought indeed to be welcomed as that rare thing, good entertainment.

THE INVISIBLE GODS. By Edith Franklin Wyatt. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Certain weaknesses of conception or of plan in Miss Wyatt's story, certain peculiarities in the execution, serve only to emphasize the fact that The Invisible Gods is, after all, a work of breadth and distinction. It is not that deadly thing, a novel technically perfect, nor that still deadlier thing a novel designed to please everybody. Its deficiencies are only its merits viewed from another angle.

To begin with, The Invisible Gods is clearly not the story of anything or

any one in particular. The title of the book is not really descriptive; it would fit any poignant tale of human destinies. The theme cannot be successfully conceived as American life, or as the conflict between the ideals of the older generation and those of the new, or as the influence of heredity, or even as the thesis, "Life is just one thing after another."

But the novel is all the better for its obvious lack of that kind of "unity" which is supposed to be useful in recommending a book to the public, both because critics approve of it and because people like to believe that the books they buy are "worth while."

Frankly, The Invisible Gods suffers from the discursiveness common to stories about a family or a group of people. The claim, frequently made for such narrations, that they are in some especial way "typical" or "representative", is usually unjustified; and The Invisible Gods has scarcely more significance of this sort than has Louisa Alcott's Little Women. But the story has unity of a rarer sort--the unity of a firm and consistent attitude, a fine apprehension of the realities and nobilities of life. Coherent, simple, and swift, the narrative is full of the keenest perceptions of fact, the most thrilling realizations of character. The beautiful sense of justice of an elderly judge, the careless generosity of an unsocial and roving geologist, the devotion to duty of a busy, public-minded physician-these qualities, presented without sentiment, are like clear streams of water in a thirsty land. One discovers them with joy and with conviction amid the realities of a story indubitably real in its complexities, its misunderstandings, its irreconcilable facts.

A more fundamental criticism would be that the novel is excessively feminine. It is, to be sure, distinctively a woman's novel; it does not belong to that class of stories in which both masculine and feminine characters are handled with the same touch and with the same appearance of authority. Miss Wyatt appears to get at her male characters largely through sympathy. There is much clairvoyance; but there is no such sure and complete understanding as the author evinces in her portraiture of women, and there is, along with the sympathy, a considerable play of fancy. Masculine readers will occasionally sense that half divination which in life occasionally perplexes or irritates a man whose mother or sister understands him too well, and yet not well enough.

One result of this limitation is that the persons in the story appear to be divisible into two classes: the real people and the bookish people. The women are invariably real; the men seem to be "created" or idealized. Paul Orme, the utterly selfish, frankly materialistic, childishly eccentric artist, appears to be a book character; so does the imaginative, irresponsible Hancock Marshfield, always too much a boy to be trusted, too much of a man to be treated as a minor, an American "Sentimental Tommy", born in Chicago. Even Jo Marshfield, the disciple of Pasteur, is a woman's hero. Miss Wyatt understands these men, their professional interests, their artistic impulses, their helplessness to be other than they are; but she does not get

inside them. To the masculine reader, they are by turns amusing, perplexing, annoying, or admirable.

Again, the story, not having fortunately a conventional plot, is much occupied with the little incompatibilities of temperament, the intimate disappointments, the partial understandings or misunderstandings, of a group of persons who in their various ways love one another. Its drama is mostly of this sort. The adjustment which the story people achieve is an adjustment among themselves. The theme is by no means unimportant—it is impossible to prove that it is not the most important of themes, this diffusive though intimate love which makes so much of our happiness or unhappiness. But the drama is feminine. One sees in this story nothing of a man's absorption in the world as distinct from his absorption in the people who make his world or in the motives women attribute to the men they adore. Jo's discouragement over his work is, in tone, a woman's discouragement, and Uncle Enos, the rover, 'as independent as a bear on a mountain top", seems to be something of an enigma even to the author.

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But all this does not really matter. It does not matter that the story is not a story of some definite subject or person, since the author through a multitude of ideas and a variety of persons gives us an authentic and critical account of human conduct motivated by love. It does not matter that some of the characters strike one as bookish. On the contrary, since our real life is filled with beings who are partly real to us and partly mere images of fancy, it appears an excellent thing that a dramatis persona should be thus made up. Every novel, one is tempted to say, should contain some merely bookish characters, like Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester. But for these, where would be our satire, our humor, our ideals, our zest? It is a positive advantage that the drama of the story is purely feminine, because, by the same token, it is genuine and intense. One cannot have everything at once. If all knew the same things about human character and that the final truth-every novel would be as dull as a doctor's thesis on psychology. It is stimulating to meet in books really vital persons that one does not quite accept for true.

What really matters is that Miss Wyatt has written a novel of extraordinary breadth, delicacy, and strength. The story makes one think of the work of Charlotte Brontë. A Charlotte Brontë, modernized and well versed in the subtleties of twentieth-century life, might have written it. Its intensity in the midst of an extraordinary variety of subject matter, handled with considerable mastery, is its leading characteristic.

THE TREE OF THE GARDEN. By Edward C. Booth. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

A certain disproportion in Mr. Booth's novel is accounted for by the presence in it of two quite separable elements-a love story and a literary convention.

Since Thomas Hardy began to write of Wessex, the novel of English rural life has become a portentous thing. In the country, especially in the English countryside, man seems close to nature. The literary mind easily envisions him as a creature of the soil. When one thinks of the immeasurable antiquity of the land, the life of man seems a brief span; compared with the revolutions of the seasons, the slow processes of nature, the mysteries of growth and reproduction, the conscious purposes of mankind seem insignificant. Human nature appears to derive all its dignity from its instincts; these at least are old, permanent, and purely natural. We have thus a variety of naturalism differing from the cult of romantic scenery. Instead of being invited to "mix up our souls with the landscape", we are solicited to mingle our sentiments with clods, with dung, with the breath of kine, with the sweat of laboring hinds. All this is impressive to those who are susceptible to such impressions. It is, if you like, a philosophy, a view of life.

One suspects, however, that, in most instances it is simply a convention, a literary method. In Mr. Booth's hands, the method is somewhat overpowering. The thoroughness with which the author applies his extensive knowledge of agricultural life, the uniformity and the studied appropriateness with which he employs the thick Yorkshire dialect-these do not offend the reader (Mr. Booth is too good an artist to give offence), but they do make one feel "as though of hemlock he had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the drains."

It is all, in its way, tremendously well done. If to secure unity through setting, and to produce an effect of dense and steaming "atmosphere" through an accumulation of details, be great novel-writing, then The Tree of the Garden is, in the respects just noted, a great novel.

To a reader who is interested rather in the varieties, the amazing resiliencies, of human nature, it is, however, even a little amusing to see how Mr. Booth wrestles with his argument. His real purpose is to tell an extraordinary love story-one might almost say a unique love story,-and he cannot tell it without a disproportionate amount of circumstantiality about pigs, cattle, the table manners of peasants, milking, blacksmithing, gossiping, courting, the whole setting in short. He is so consistent that even his metaphors savor of the farm. "Master Openshaw missed his mother with the poignancy and brevity of youth, but its soil is not deep enough, nor dunged with a sufficiency of experience, to bring forth lasting crops of sorrow."

Conscientiously adhering to another convention of the story type he has chosen, Mr. Booth has made most of the persons in his novel curiously willless. Master Openshaw is a pampered child, a mother's boy, sent to the country for his health. Mrs. Openshaw is a fool, motivated by maternal sentiments. The rustic characters are sodden and changeless. Master Openshaw, who has been carefully protected from any knowledge of sex, becomes involved with old Hardrip's lass (of whom more is presently to be said). The girl, made bold by an innocent passion, invites him to walk with her by night. Openshaw, who, at the time of this experience, is a lad of six