Symons, Arthur. [Spiritual adventures.] **$2.50. Dutton.
“These stories, each of which deals with a separate personality, are studies of decadence. They explore the relation between life and art.” (Ath.) In each of the eight studies the author “is intent on reproducing a distinct temperamental type, or, to put it in another way, in each case he has isolated a temperament and assigned it to a person.” (Outlook.) “‘Esther Kahn’ is perhaps the most wholesome of these haunting stories, having a definite culmination in the creation of the artist through suffering. But on the whole, ‘The death of Peter Waydelin’ is the achievement of the book, in the tragedy and realistic horror of its setting.” (Critic.)
“They are all, as one would expect, stories of the better sort, not depending upon incident, but expounding some emotional situation. For the work of an author not accustomed to express himself in this medium, they are surprisingly well told, though they present some of the technical defects which the essayist who sets himself to write stories is seldom able to avoid.”
+ Acad. 69: 1148. N. 4, ’05. 1330w. Ath. 1906, 1: 161. F. 10. 1790w.
“It is Mr. Symons’s simple and forceful style, with its delicate psychic touches, combined with his really great gift for the vital story, which disarms our criticism of his philosophy.”
+ Critic. 48: 189. F. ’06. 380w.
“His very cleverness and facility make it more to be regretted that he has wasted his time in portraiture, brilliant but without significance, of subjects that are hardly worthy of such distinction.”
+ – Dial. 40: 201. Mr. 16, ’06. 380w.
“Evocations, these tales, if tales you can call them, will prove attractive for some to whom English fiction has become too material, too much a thing of bricks and mortar.” James Huneker.