Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/766

A Landscape Painter, by Henry James (12mo, 287 pages; Scott & Seltzer), is a collection of stories, early flowerings of the portentous genius of their author. They are superior stuff; but the fashion of believing that James corrupted his style in his later years is proved silly enough by the fact that intensely passionate and fine as they are, they do not quite come off. For any one else they might be considered little masterpieces; for him they are but the grammar of novelettes.

The Matrix, by Maria Thompson Daviess (12mo, 260 pages; Century), lights another beacon to celebrate the post-bellum discovery of Lincoln. It is a gentle taper. Attempting to tell the story of the girlhood and wooing of Nancy Hanks with simplicity, the author occasionally lapses into primer-technique. A maturer style could have given form to a more enduring romance.

Evander, by Eden Phillpotts (12mo, 200 pages; Macmillan), presents the English novelist tracking a favourite theme of his back to the borderland of mythology, where it is threshed out amid a verbal clash of the gods. Evander is one of those self-righteous male beings, with a serene ignorance of human emotion, such as Phillpotts drew in The Thief of Virtue, and more recently in Storm in a Teacup. The projection of this type against a background of pagan philosophy gives the author a satirical scope less marked in his modern stories.

Luca Sarto, by Charles S. Brooks (12mo, 360 pages; Century), tilts a merry lance amid the sombre moderns with their black-visored Freudian fiction, unfolding a lively tale of conspiracy and adventure, laid in Paris in the days of Villon. It has the sparkle of brightly burnished armour and a pulse-quickening pace. The manner of the telling is not without a touch of swagger, spiced with the salt flavour of the modern point-of-view, humorous and whimsical. A novel to the king's taste—if there are still kings who can boast that quality.