The characters are memorable. Not so much by their descriptions as by their actions are they impressed. Mr. McFee has taken so much pains, by inserting a preface to the effect, to assure his readers that the story is purely fiction, that one is tempted to wonder which of the characters are drawn from life.
“Command” is, to be dogmatic, Mr. McFee’s best book; though various people will at once proceed to deny that, they will certainly agree that his work has been so uniformly good as to place it very near the top.
C. G. P.
Where the Blue Begins. By Christopher Morley. (Doubleday, Page & Co.)
To say anything critical about Mr. Morley’s book is like saying anything critical about “Jurgen”—it is impossible—and “Where the Blue Begins” hasn’t even the depths of salacious possibilities which permitted the columnists to fill their columns in the days of Cabell’s first prominence. In fact, it is nowhere so deep as “Jurgen”, yet it is another of those books out of which you may get as much as you bring to it, though you are acutely doubtful throughout whether the author intended half the thoughts he has created within you. But “Where the Blue Begins” is a delightful fantasy for anybody. The whimsical adventures of Gissing are just the disorganized evening-hour adventures in which anyone with a mind is apt to indulge.
“Where the Blue Begins” is an evening-hour book, or rather, a book for several evening-hours. When the fatigued upper-classman has his to-morrow’s Freshman calculus laid aside as a bad job, and has lit his pipe in complete acquiescence to the fact that his brain is in a fog, let him prop his feet against the new University fire-screen and seek happiness with Christopher Morley. But leave a call with the janitor for chapel time next day. You will never know when Morley stopped and your own dreams began.
D. G. C.
Pre-Raphaelite and Other Poets. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Dodd, Mead & Company. Net, $2.50.)
The unusual imaginative mind of Hearn, through Irish and Greek parentage, and exposure to Japanese culture, combined weird romanticism and realism with a strange mysticism. To this variegated composite, he added a background of concepts formulated in England, the United States, and St. Pierre. These impressions, visual and mental, produced spontaneously literary projections ranging from “Stray Leaves from Strange Literature” in 1884 to “Japan, an Interpretation” in 1904.