living a man the Archdeacon can only see as an unbeliever and a destroyer. Persecution mania at last completely masters Brandon; his distrust extends to the last of his household, his daughter Joan, happy in her undisclosed betrothal to Lord St. Leath, but ready to sacrifice her lover to her father. At the Chapter meeting Brandon puts the final strain upon his powers in opposing the election of Ronder's candidate, and falls dead. Yet it was hardly the Cathedral, for all the "hatred and malice and pride and jealousy" rampant in the Precincts, that destroyed Brandon. The Cathedral is impressively used as an influence dominating the whole drama, but it is to their own passions, not to the worship and sacrifice the Cathedral exacts of them, that Mr. Walpole's dignitaries are victims. In the end it is clear that Whistons, elected to the St. Pybus living, will be to Ronder in another way what Ronder was to Brandon. Mr. Walpole's book is full of significance in many ways. Technically, however, it shows his old fault. When Falk and Annie, Mrs. Brandon and Canon Morris, whose stories are treated as though they had more than incidental importance, leave the Polchester stage, Mr. Walpole is indifferent to their fortunes.

The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells (Cassell). Sir Richmond Hardy is conscious of approaching breakdown, and Dr. Martineau recommends a motor tour in the West of England and accompanies his patient upon it. Sir Richmond finds their journey an opportunity for a general gaol-delivery of the ideas and ideals that have long been cramped within him, denied expression by the pressure of duties on the Fuel Commission. These are the common stock of Mr. Wells's later characters: the World State, inevitably, its particular detail being this time the scheme for the world-conservation of fuel; and sexual problems with an unsatisfactory marriage as their background. At Stonehenge he meets a kindred spirit, Miss Grammont, the young daughter of an American oil-king. She, too, is making travel a healing process, and, as her ailments are much akin to Sir Richmond's, and his world-gospel finds in her an eager disciple, the result of further touring and high thinking is a love affair from which Dr. Martineau flees in some disgust. After a grievous parting Sir Richmond goes on overworking on his Fuel Commission, and pays for great achievements with his life. If his wife and Miss Grammont had sufficed his emotional expansiveness, he might have been a more impressive figure; as things are, his obsession makes him somewhat grotesque. Mr. Wells is as stimulating as ever, but his us? of the novel as a vehicle for fragments of essays does justice to neither form.

Mr. Prohack, by Arnold Bennett (Methuen). The war left Mr. Prohack, a middle-aged Treasury official, with a wife, a daughter, and a son just out of the Army and unable to get into anything else, among the New Poor. From this pass he was extricated by a legacy from a friend to whom he had lent 100l. before the war. The friend had been a profiteer, but Mr. Prohack lived in days that are hard upon the scrupulous; he accepted the legacy, and was induced to invest some of it in oil. Wealth gushed from those particular wells, and Mr. Prohack became fantastically rich. This is all that matters as far as Mr. Bennett's story is a story. Mr. Bennett's major works have

either the Time motive or the Money motive, and this belongs to the latter class. The rest of the book might equally well have been an essay on how to spend money entertainingly and gain satisfaction without compromising one's liberty. Mr. Prohack is essentially a humorist and a quietist; he joins in the dance-quite literally-and takes a placid interest in his own performances; but he is not carried away. His wife and daughter use their wealth for their own ends in their own way-raiment, a large house, the cultivation of genius, and general social hostilities-Mr. Prohack looking on or collaborating with a nice blend of the husband, the father, and the cosmic philosopher. He watches his son playing the spendthrift on principle, to "take it out of this noble country" that would not let him do anything useful.. He explores the possibilities of London, the theatre, the approved seaside resorts. He likes most of the things he sees and the people he meets. But the rich absurdity of the spectacle is as vivid to him as all its seductions; satire is as evident in the book as the gusto Mr. Bennett has for material enticements.

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (Jonathan Cape). It is at least arguable that an introduction by Mr. Hugh Walpole and a glossary at the end of the book may cause the English reader to feel that he is facing something of an undertaking in Mr. Sinclair Lewis's novel. The cinematograph and the theatre, however, will have given the ordinary man a sufficiently large American vocabulary for his needs. George F. Babbitt, like the Zenith City he adorns, is a composite photograph. He is a prosperous estate agent-"realtor," as he prefers it-and the reader learns in detail that never ceases to be both entertaining and interpretative what he wears, eats, and reads, how he goes about his toilet, his business, and his recreation, what he is to his family, his friends, and his fellow-citizens. What Babbitt is in his secret self is another matter; and the contrast between his real restlessness and clumsy self-questioning, and the abounding optimism, materialism, and contentment with all that the majority about him believes, demanded of him by the society he lives in, gives him his true significance. The English reader will be dismayed by the dreadful publicity of the private citizen's life, conduct, and opinions, and, to use Mr. Wells's phrase, the "vile gregariousness" of the community under the dominion of Big Business, advertisements, newspapers, Rotary and Uplift. Babbitt is put to the test, and subjected to the attentions of a kind of Holy Office of his business connexions and neighbours, through his loyalty to his best friend, the local Ishmael. To the tyranny of his environment and its conventions, of standardisation of habits and opinions, Babbitt has to succumb. Mr. Sinclair Lewis's satire is relentless, and an extraordinary gift of parody enables him to do the right amount of injustice to the Press, business associations, and the commercialised evangelism of the Billy Sunday type.

The Highbrows, by C. E. M. Joad (Jonathan Cape). The author defines Highbrows as "the intelligentsia who constitute the nervous system of a modern community," and he has loosed upon them as they go about their works of social amelioration, political discussions, colonies, and other manifestations of freak living and diffuse thinking, and

bizarre amours, a nuisance named Pramp, who disorganises their society and every other he enters, largely by putting into practice their own dearest principles. At times there is a suggestion that the idea of parodying the modern novel was an afterthought; though Pramp is introduced as a freshman at Oxford in the best contemporary manner, the threat is not followed up. Readers with inside knowledge of the bodies aimed at in the Lads' Club, the Ephemeral Club, and the Mivian Society, enjoy some advantage. Mr. Joad's first novel is an entertaining piece of waywardness, and more economical writers will profit by the ideas he can afford to scatter so lavishly about his pages. Pamela Herself, by Desmond Coke (Chapman & Hall). Mr. Desmond Coke, who has written of the boys' side of public-school life with so much humour and insight, lays the scene of his new novel beyond the symbolical green baize door dividing the Head Master's house from the rest of Sefton. Pamela, who at the age of seventeen marries the Head Master, Henry Kitson, to escape a weary round of Continental resorts in the train of her determinedly girlish mother, Lady Mortimer, finds Sefton chilly and repellent. Her husband is absorbed in its concerns, prouder of his School than any father could be of his child. "Shop" is an eternal affliction, and the masters and masters' wives forming the society centred in the School are anything but congenial company. Pamela's youth makes her offend either by mishaps due to nervousness or by escapades compromising her dignity. Motherhood saves her for a time from being engulfed by Sefton, but she sees her children, Joyce and Raymond, escaping her as they grow up. Another great School snatches Raymond from her when he is fourteen, and Joyce is herself a wife two years later. Pamela begins to find sympathy, humour, and understanding in a new master Brian Lever, and the emotion on both sides only needs a crisis to provoke a conclusive discharge. The crisis is brought about by a boobytrap of Raymond's (who had been moved to his father's school), which injures Lever. Raymond boggles at owning up to his own father, who, being pure essence of schoolmaster, magnifies the offence, and expels his son when he finds him to be the culprit who would not honourably admit his guilt. Pamela fights desperately for Raymond, but the Head Master is not to be moved. She gives way to her passion for Lever and runs away with him. Henry Kitson accepts the situation. Raymond goes to a crammer's, and the green baize door is moved to give Pamela's quarters back to the devouring School. Brian Lever's irresponsibility makes him live for the passing moment only, and at one bitter moment the situation forces itself upon Pamela: "the old, old story-the husband's refusal to divorce; the children's resentment and contempt; the lover brought to earth by the necessity to work; the growing shabbiness, the quarrels, the blame of one another; the sordid life not lit up by respect." Mr. Coke's writing was never more deft, and if Pamela's character awakens more impatience than sympathy at times, it is because the author, however alive to the comedy of public-school communities, can never make such surroundings seem other than delectable.

The Room, by G. B. Stern (Chapman & Hall), tells the story of Ursula Maxwell, who was in love with loneliness. Even the complicated adjustments of the accommodation of The Laburnums to the requirements

of the family have left her a bedroom to herself, her refuge and secret kingdom. Hal, the eldest son and hero of the household, falls into disgrace for what approaches a theft, and to prevent her titular "Aunt" Lavvy, whose dear-little-old-ladyness covers intense selfishness and obstinacy, from spreading the scandal outside the family, Ursula gives up to her the cherished room Aunt Lavvy has always coveted. But Ursula's sacrifice is not properly understood or rewarded. Part I. ends with Ursula's departure for boarding-school, and when Part II. opens she is married to Doug Barrison, whose abbreviation of his Christian name well indicates his pet pose as the man of the hard life and the open spaces, reluctantly enduring civilisation. His skill in this rôle ensures him innumerable conquests in their boarding-house, and Ursula thinks she will save herself humiliation by persuading him to take up life in the country. Part III. plunges them into the rustic but ferocious intrigues of St. Meniot's, whose inhabitants are drawn with malignant care. In the end they light upon a cottage in which Ursula finds again-her room. Many readers will find an intimate delight in the complications surrounding the future tenancy of the premises they vacate for it. In Part IV. Doug is ready for further episodes, and Ursula resolves to bring one about and cope with it. She invites the tomboyish Christine Powys, with the inevitable result. Christine has Ursula's room, and Ursula finds herself jealous of the girl dreaming there, free from overwhelming Doug. Her neighbour, Louis Gregson, is going to London, and Ursula amazes him by suddenly asking him to take her with him. She dislikes him, mistaking him for commonplace, but he is only to be a dummy lover. As a safeguard for Christine she invites Aunt Lavvy. The railway strike detains Ursula and Louis in a hotel close at hand, and in their long discussion Louis makes her see the situation more clearly. Her flight only gives Doug the chance to rob Christine of her lonely dreams in return for his cheap histrionics. Ursula must sacrifice herself again and go back. Doug can pretend to himself, and Christine can hug her romance. But what Christine really regrets as she leaves is the sweet and lonely room. Miss Stern's book is full of wit, character, and imagination, though the reader regrets parting company so soon and so completely with the thronged household of the earlier part of the book.

The Lonely Unicorn, by Alec Waugh (Grant Richards). Mr. Waugh's novel is rather episodic in character, and it is not clear in what way he finds the exploits of his central figure, Roland Whately, at all significant. The elder Whately has risen with industry and privation to a good position in a bank. He lives, in the suburb of Hammerton, an ordered monotonous life that his son despises. Roland Whately is at a public school, Fernhurst, when the novel opens, and the author of The Loom of Youth naturally makes good use of the opportunities the early chapters afford him. No one looks forward more eagerly to his holidays than a neighbour's daughter, April Curtis, and their boy-and-girl affection encourages the usual assumptions as to the future. But Roland ends his career at Fernhurst, and forfeits the prospect of Oxford, through, as the Chief puts it, "philandering with girls in the town." He is at a loose end at home for a time, but, just as he is threatened with engulfment in

the drab life of Hammerton, a chance meeting with an old school friend, Marston, leads to his obtaining a place in the Marston firm. As a commercial traveller he scores heavily for his firm abroad, mainly through a successful pretence of intimacy with a distinguished foreign minister. The Marstons have taken him up, and he has learnt at Hogstead to belong to a world very different from that of Hammerton. At home he is urged to marry early, April being of course in his mother's mind. What he does is to throw over that sweet and faithful girl, whose love, it is true, he had never fully returned, and engage himself to Muriel Marston, his employer's daughter, the following week-end. She is empty and childish, seeing in love, courtship, and marriage nothing but a new exhilarating game; and when the book closes, at the moment when the two are left alone on the wedding night, it is certain that he has cheated April of her happiness without securing his own. The story is well told, and the characters move and speak like human beings; but there is little beyond the commonplace in them and in their fates, and higher things have been expected of Mr. Alec Waugh.

The Enchanted April, by the author of "Elizabeth and her German Garden" (Macmillan & Co.). The advertisement of a small mediæval Italian castle to be let furnished for the month of April captures the imagination of Mrs. Wilkins of Hampstead, the victim of monotony and stale matrimony, and another sufferer, Mrs. Arbuthnot. To lighten the expense they advertise for two other women to share the castle, and secure the company of a young society beauty, Lady Caroline Dester, weary of intensive masculine adoration, and old Mrs. Fisher, who only wants to sit about and remember the great Victorians she had known in a less degenerate age. The delights of San Salvatore exceed all Mrs. Wilkins's anticipations, and Italy in April works miracles. It melts the frost in which nothing but their own diverse forms of selfishness have bound their spirits. Mrs. Wilkins, buoyant and hopeful by nature, able to radiate and evoke affection, is the first to be released, and the others are not long imprisoned. Mrs. Arbuthnot loses her primness and aridity, Lady Caroline her tawdriness and boredom, Mrs. Fisher her self-centredness and suspicion. Before the transformation there has been abundant opportunity for the malicious comedy in which "Elizabeth" excels; afterwards there is laughter enough, but it is benevolent and sweet. Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot discover themselves in love with their husbands again, and before long the Hampstead solicitor and the author of massive but piquant lives of the frail, are under the influences that have brought happiness back to their wives. Young Mr. Briggs, the owner of San Salvatore, also arrives in time to profit by the enchantment wrought upon the beautiful, the high-born Scrap," and the fairy-tale happy ending is complete. "Elizabeth" makes the castle by the Mediterranean exert no little of its wizardry upon the reader.

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Uncle Moses, by Sholom Asch (T. Fisher Unwin). Moses Melnick emigrated, and came back to his old Polish village of Kuzmin as the wealthy American. Relatives went back to America with him, others followed, and soon practically the whole of Kuzmin found itself in the New York Bowery sewing clothes for the tyrannical Uncle Moses and his favourite nephew, Sam. One of the number is the shiftless Aaron