New-York tribune., 1918-03-17
"The Tree of Heauen" by May Sin
clair, published By the Macmillan Com
pGny, Neac York. sf.6O.
<kC ONE ONE has said that, before

<kCOME ONE has said that, before
- the war, the average Englishman
would accept any remark con-
: corning himself or country with a sor-
rowful complacence, provided the remark
were sufficiently disparaging," observes
reviewer of books in "The Oakland Trib-
une." Before August, in 1914, it was
y the habit to call England decadent and
neurotic, and it was the mission of GER
tain of her literary lights to write causti-
cally concerning the yosth of the land
and the delusions that were theirs we
s.are in bad way wrote the older novel
lists, and seem destined to be in worse
one Young England, we are told, was
debauched and indolent and there was
need of an awakening that seemed all but
impossible. Small WONDER" declares the
reviewer, chat the effects of the war
- upon the present generation in England
should be seized upon by novelists who see
arrived, almost in a day, that regenera-
ton
y There is another way of characterizing
the material which May Sinclair found
ready at hand when she sat down to "The
Tree of Heaven" This is pl1rased by
writer in "The Philadelphia Press:
"In the former England a great many
things matter: jealousy, love affairs, art,
militant sufragism. But in the Transformed
wartime England only one thing really
counts: to fight and die for country and
freedom"
Or, once more, another writer, in "The
Philadelphia North American" sees the
g awful fact of war come "clashing to the
fore. There is a summary end
of Victorian methods, Meredithian fnesse
and tattle and gable over 4 o'clock tea"
C UGH national picture forms the we'll
~ from which Miss Sinclair has drawn
the inspiration for book which, most of
I the critics agree, is one of the best of the
war books, and a work full of enduring
literary qualities. The story itself con-
Germs a solid, respectable, rather wealthy
a and to some extent cultured English fam
lily: mother who believes things must
always go on just as they have been going
and who concentrates passionately upon
her three growing boys, more casually upon
her single daughter; a father who re-
mains something of a shadow, so far as
the tale goes; and various relatives, all
forcefully drawn, who enter in one way
and another into the action as it unfolds.
1.-The story is CONSTRUCTED measurably on
three volume lines dear to romancers when
time was young and cheap, and every
body wrote with quill pens" 1t divides
into three parts, Peace, The Vortex and
Victory. And writer in "The New York
Globe" suggests that Miss Sinclair might
have explained the story's divisions in
this way:
= "The first part, in which, the mother,
Frances, would have said, nothing ever hap
: pens, and the cat is permitted to make a
, bed of The Times; the second part, in
which things begin to happen, such as the
militant suffragsts, the obstreperous Irish,
&. the recalcitrant poets and uneasy labor; and
. the third and last part, in which everything
happens, and each little vortex-sufrage,
the new art, or what's sucked down into
the great inescapabe dreadful vortex of the
war"
4 REVIEWER out West, writing in
"A The San Francisco Chronicle, !"
finds the book doing for England what
"Christine" did for Germany, "by pre-
senting a most interesting and appar-
emily faithful picture of the country and
its people just before and during the ear
lier stages of the war; And the con-
trasts presented by these two books, he
points out, will be found most striking
'"In the one book Germany preparing
everything for war; in the other England
prepared for nothing not even the little