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beauty and strength could be realised. It is the story of a man who, recovering from an illness, strays one afternoon into a graveyard and sits by the unconsecrated grave of one Sabathier; drowsing there, and awakening into a sense of strangeness, he grows conscious of something akin to demoniacal possession, which touches not simply his mind but changes also his face into the abhorred likeness of the buried outcast. Consummate is the skill with which this incredible possibility is made convincing to the victim, his sceptical wife, his friends, and-most difficult of all-to the reader. The single, profound impression of interfusing spiritual and physical is not maintained equally throughout the book, but this metaphysic dominates the whole without rendering the story less than imaginative. The difficult abyss between imagination and invention might be surveyed in the first and second parts of The Return'; certainly, in the first, imagination is absolute. Spiritual horror peers through, and spiritual beauty expels the horror; and the story of that wrestling with principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world pierces and dismays the reader. It is the more wonderful since this tragic battle is set within a commonplace suburban home, with a detestable wife and a too briefly seen, adorable child for witnesses. In one short scene there is an almost unendurable anguish of recognition, when poor Arthur Lawford is suddenly confronted with the child to whom, for her sake only, he shows his changed face as that of the doctor:

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'Alice turned, dismayed, and looked steadily, almost with hostility, at the stranger, so curiously transfixed and isolated in her small old play-room. And in this scornful yet pleading confrontation her eye fell suddenly on the pin in his scarf— the claw and the pearl she had known all her life. From that her gaze flitted, like some wild, demented thing's, over face, hair, hands, clothes, attitude, expression; and her heart stood still in an awful, inarticulate dread of the unknown. She turned slowly towards her mother, groped forward a few steps, turned once more, stretching out her hands towards the vague, still figure whose eyes had called so piteously to her out of their depths, and fell fainting in the doorway.'

As tender, as perfect, is the later scene when the

child secretly visits him; but this I cannot quote here, for to isolate would be to spoil it. That the evil metempsychosis is defeated is the least significant fact in the story; the significance lies in the struggle, the lonely courage, the beauty springing up in the bleakness of a narrow and material neighbourhood. To speak in an image of 'The Return' is to say that in the cold, owlish darkness of the mind a light shines, making that darkness suddenly crystal with beamy reflexions-every wet spray beaded with tiny mirrors yet with no clear light anywhere. Oddly enough, where the story is apparently autobiographical, it diminishes the impression of the rest; but perhaps it is not odd that voluble characters should be a distraction, even if one of them speaks with the roving and restless curiosity which so exactly suggests the author's talk. But even when these incessant verticulations are most bewildering, deep and simple things are said "The more one thinks about life the worse it becomes-and that of poor Sabathier, 'What peace did he find who couldn't, perhaps, like you, face the last good-bye?'

In

In looking at Mr de la Mare's most recent work in verse and prose, I cannot evade an impression that the change which was lightly apparent in 'Motley' has been strongly developed in the brief intervening years. 'The Veil' he is seen often painfully far from his imaginative sphere, reverting to it in desire but bitterly alienated: treading the harsher ways of the common sphere, unable to accept it, unable to escape from it, seeing it as a moral enormity and that other as a spiritual sweetness, but no longer passing as it were at will from this to that. The simplicities and the ingenuities of joy have alike waned; doubts rise and do not sink again, but are met by affirmations, or softened by consolatory whispers. The heart of furious fancies has been startled by a vision that is no cloudy fancythe callous, rude-carven image of time, with change and sorrow in tributary posture at his feet. Enchantment is forgone or forgotten, and interpretation begins.

The publication of 'The Memoirs of a Midget' had already prompted such misgivings as these, when 'The Veil' following showed that the new attitude was not a

casual one, or a dramatic assumption, but an inward change or growth. Had the author wanted to prove the unkindness of fate or circumstance towards the tenderest of sensitive things, the natural cruelty of human hearts, the sadder cruelty of egoism, his choice of theme and his treatment of character would have made the new novel an exhaustive proof. But he did not want to prove anything, certainly not anything desperate, bitter, relaxing; and hence it seems that the melancholy frustrations of 'The Memoirs of a Midget,' and the mere insistent painfulness, are but an involuntary utterance of the unhappiness with which Mr de la Mare, stung by a sense of the irreconcilable, has contemplated life in its ruins-life of which all the beauty and energy have dwindled into the simple making the best of a bad job.' A midgetary 'Jude the Obscure' might hardly breathe an air of crueller sorrow than the poor nymph of our author's imagination; the parable of life is moralised to a purpose as sombre as that of Mr Hardy himself, whose spiritual influence, indeed, is the only one to which the younger writer has made obeisance.

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All this may be read more clearly in the novel than in the latest verse, because the novel presents its theme with a fuller consistency than is possible in a collection of lyrics. And, too, it is more conspicuous by reason of the great contrast between the earlier chapters of the novel, with their beauty of reminiscence, and the extravagance of invention in the later chapters. Almost anywhere you may find passages which recall Mr Doughty's serene fairy landscapes, or tempt you to cry, A new Nymphidia!' so bright, so precise, so minute are the passionate beauties of Mr de la Mare's prose. But the surviving impression is the moral; the crystal, imaginative kingdom is far off when the last page of the book is turned; it is in a world of cold dun light that the reader wakes with the haunting evil of Fanny Bowater, the futility of Mr Anon, the worldliness of all the worldly, the weakness of all the unworldly, echoing or darkening around him.

'The Veil' is less completely dominated by the new spirit and offers more frequent contrasts. To speak of some poems as being poems of disillusion is to suggest that the others, in the more familiar mode, are poems

of illusion, and that would be false to poet and critic alike; but nevertheless there are not only signs of change, there is also, as I have said before, an evident consciousness of change. Mr de la Mare still writes out of the old enchantment:

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'Now night is astir with burning stars
In darkness of the snow;

Burdened with frankincense and myrrh
And gold the Strangers go

Into a dusk where one dim lamp

Burns faintly, Lo!'

He returns to the lost world :

'Coral and clear emerald,

And amber from the sea,
Lilac-coloured amethyst,
Chalcedony ;

The lovely Spirit of Air

Floats on a cloud and doth ride,

Clad in the beauties of earth

Like a bride.'

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But now it is a revisitation and no longer inhabitation. Many of the poems in the volume called The Veil' suggest that the veil has been rent, and within is a fireless altar, an empty shrine. Empty with loveliness, is his own phrase, which may be transferred to the world in which he is moving; for whatever of exquisite he reveals in these poems brings the sorrowful persuasion of emptiness and forlornness. 'Is it to Vacancy I these tidings tell?' is his question in a lyric curiously entitled The Monologue'; and he even deplores an answer, and would only cling to Faith' for sanity's sake.' One of the most beautiful of all his beautiful things is Not That Way,' and yet even here is the reiterating lament:

'Alas, that beauty hangs her flowers

For lure of his demoniac powers.'

His most piercing cry is a question, heard in the haunting shriek of the owl; or if he answers his own riddle of the universe, it is to say of man :

'Oh, rather, idly breaks he in
To an Eden innocent of sin ;
And, prouder than to be afraid,

Forgets his Maker in the made.'

The image that he sees is not the old sweet beckoning image; it is named Despair; and he no longer speaks quietly to a friendly Familiar but calls loudly, unavailingly, 'O Master, thick cloud shuts thee out!' It is to this solemn effect that Mr de la Mare has turned from creation to interpretation, and the mere fact that a fine mind should reveal this great change in such a discouragement and misgiving betrays the modern philosophy in its clearest direction.

A careful reader will look for a development in style when the change of spirit is so conspicuous; and here also the prose and verse bear witness. The prose of 'The Memoirs of a Midget' is highly concentrated, and takes small heed to the weakness of mortality; it is so tense, so packed, so vividly and restlessly pictorial, that you rise from a prolonged reading with eyes smarting as though you had peered too closely at a pattern which a midget only might study with ease. In this minute agility the mind sees no point of rest; and while the prose thus matches the extravagant consciousness, the very ecstasy of self-consciousness, of the star-crossed Midget, it fatigues or bewilders the grosser reader. And in considering the 'style' of the book in more than a restricted technical sense, the humblest admirer may be disconcerted by the incessant moralisation of the Midget's world; a moralisation to which not herself alone but most of the characters-that is, most of the women-contribute. Might not the disease of thought have been soothed a little? Might not the moral impression have been silently presented in circumstance and character, instead of in explicit challenge and pleading? To utter such doubts is to say again that the first part of this novel triumphs in its silence, and the second fails because of its too obstinate questioning. Memorably beautiful, nevertheless, are a hundred

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