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THE STAR IN THE WEST.
By Captain J. F. C. Fuller. 6s. net.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
The Northern Whig says: "The Star in the West," by Captain Fuller, is a critical essay on the poetical works of Aleister Crowley, and the name will sound familiar in the ears of any who pride themselves on having more than a bowing acquaintance with modern letters. Mr. Crowley has over thirty volumes to his credit, and the sheer art of his verse should rank him high amongst modern singers. He has, however, deliberately preferred to write for the few, and the course he has mapped out for himself includes the consideration of questions which the majority are content to shuffle into the background. Captain Fuller writes with a generous enthusiasm that it is pleasant to find in these degenerate days, but one wonders if he was the best guide along a very difficult path. His pen slips too readily into rhetorical glorification of his hero, and this kind of writing does not help us much to a critical appreciation of a poet's work.
I here offer this work to my readers as a twisted clue of silk and hemp to guide them safely through the labyrinthine mysteries of poetry and magic, whose taurine crags hug the blue sky, amorous as the kisses of Pasiphae, across the Elysian fields of myrtle and asphodel . . . to the cool groves of Eleusis childlike dreaming in the bosom of silvery Attica by the blue Ægean Sea.
The volume is a curious mixture ranging from fine lyrical poetry to an exposition of "Crowleyanity" which Captain Fuller assures us begins where agnosticism and scientific Buddhism end. It will not please all tastes, nor is it suitable for all, but verses like this—and there are scores as good in the book—are too rare to be the property of a few:
The spears of the night at her onset
Are lords of the day for a while,
The magical green of the sunset
The magical blue of the Nile;
Afloat are the gales
In our slumberous sails,
On the beautiful breast of the Nile.
The East Anglian Daily Times says: "The Star in the West," by Captain J. F. C. Fuller (the Walter Scott Publishing Company, Limited), consists of a critical essay upon the works of Aleister Crowley, who is described as having "unstrung the mystic lyre of life from the tree of the knowledge of Good and of Evil, singing old songs and new, flinging shrill notes of satire to this tumultuous world, as some stormy petrel shrilly crying to the storm; or sweet notes of love, soft as the whispering wings of a butterfly." Captain Fuller's language is always picturesque, and those who have not read Crowley's poems could not discover a more enthusiastic cicerone. He insists on the superabundance of the poet's genius and the diversity of his form, points that find ample accentuation in the course of the work. Crowley has been eminently unconventional, and has not called a spade an agricultural implement. Captain Fuller declares that what Beardsley and Whistler did for art, Crowley is now doing for poetry, and he adds that his hero is now superseding Swinburne.
What's On says: This work is called "a critical essay on the writings of Aleister Crowley." Yet it is, in truth, far more than this, being a highly original study of morals and religion by a new writer, who is as entertaining as the average novelist is dull. Nowadays human thought has taken a higher place in the creation; our emotions are weary of bad baronets and stolen wills; they are now only excited by spiritual crises, catastrophes of the reason, triumphs of the intelligence. In these
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