Book Reviews

The Captain’s Doll. By D. H. Lawrence. (Thomas Seltzer.)

There is, in all living literature, a kind of between-the-lines expression of the atmosphere belonging to the described period and the described place. With the advent of literary interest in thought as well as action, the point of view peculiar to the time, the race, and the situation has been present also. To create these mysterious things by connotation from the written word, so that the reader becomes, temporarily, contemporary and incident with the characters of the story, is at least one of the essentials of a permanent novel. And while I am not at all prepared to predict permanency for The Captain’s Doll, I feel that Mr. Lawrence has been particularly happy in this strange business of evoking environmental atmosphere.

For instance, there is a moment in the first “novelette”—the volume contains three—when the German Countess-heroine and the Scotch Captain-hero are climbing a Tyrol Alp in a motorbus. The Alps and a motorbus! Everywhere, against the naked looming rocks and great glaciers, the blue sky and the blown clouds, are bulky trucks, picknickers, and “the wrong kind of rich Jews”. There are wild mosses and berry bushes among the rocks, but “the many hundreds of tourists who passed up and down did not leave much to pick”. Yet the exhilaration and the spell that belong to climbing even a civilized mountain are there; the civilized climbers get out of their lorry and feel it. The German Countess feels it in a glad, pagan abandonment: she likes the wind in her face, and she likes to see “away beyond, the lake lying far off and small, the wall of those other rocks like a curtain of stone, dim and diminished to the horizon. And the sky with curdling clouds and blue sunshine intermittent”. She “breathes deep breaths”, and says, “Wonderful, wonderful to be high up!” The English-Scot feels it, but in a different way. “His eyes were dilated with excitement that was ordeal or mystic battle rather than the Bergheil ecstacy.” He looks soulfully out, out of the world, hating the mountains for their excitement, and their “uplift” that takes him beyond himself, and he feels bigger than the mountains. All that, as Mr. Lawrence tells it, comes pretty close to “getting” these races in a phase of our era, a phase which is important because man in relation to nature is man at his best. And anyone who has climbed mountains of late years will appreciate the realism of the picture, and of the story’s atmosphere.

But I said I could not predict the future for The Captain’s Doll. To me, Mr. Lawrence seems supremely able in handling the psychology of the moment, but less effective with the dynamic psychology necessary for his drama. I am not sure his characters would act as they do; I think no others would. Through a series of individual snapshots which are real to the life, Captain Hepburn and Countess Hannele move in a manner I cannot take for granted. More decidedly I should apply this criticism to the principals in the second story, The Fox. Over time, these people are all a little queer: it is the fault in most of this “new” kind of writing.

D. G. C.

Members of the Family. By Owen Wister. (The MacMillan Company.)

When the cauldron of contemporary American literature has boiled down and the dross been skimmed off by the years, there will be a special and enduring mold set aside for the works of Owen Wister. In his writings and in the pictures of Frederick Remington a richly romantic period of our national life will be long preserved. The Virginia, Lin McLean, and Scipio Le Moyne, even as the nightingale, were not born for death. As Scipio himself remarked, “I ain’t going to die for years and years.”

The eight short stories included in Members of the Family are typical of Mr. Wister’s most delightful and vivid manner. Those who enjoyed The Virginian or Red Men and White will wax happy over such tales as The Gift Horse and Where It Was. Owen Wister’s characters are unusual to us, but like that most fanciful of characters, Long John Silver, they live. For humor, strength of plot, characterization, and general worth this collection takes rank with the very highest.

F. D. A.

A Book of British and American Verse. Edited by Henry Van Dyke. (Doubleday, Page & Co.)

As a general rule anthologies are of a distinct sameness. The most noticeable thing, therefore, in regard to this collection of verse by Henry Van Dyke is his novel method of arrangement. Instead of fitting the poems in chronologically he segregates them according to their poetical form. The volume is divided into six sections, devoted respectively to: ballads; idylls or stories in verse; lyrics; odes; sonnets and epigrams; and elegies and epitaphs.

As to the selection, it is as judicious as one would expect coming from Mr. Van Dyke. An attractive feature is the inclusion of a considerable number of modern poems. In quantity the collection lies between the Oxford Book of English Verse and Burton Stevenson’s Home Book of Verse, being nearer to the former. It is especially adapted for use in class-room work and is a valuable addition to a small library, from a utilitarian as well as an aesthetic viewpoint.

F. D. A.