The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-01-18

gets results. Her GdTelully CoHSiueicb brief sentences are winged, and fly into your brain like so many sharp lit tie arrows There must be 30 or 40 characters in the book, and each is as distinct and as memorable as if as much time had been given to their delineatioii as to the cool and deliberate calculation l involved in their conception. They are likable or detestable, according to the readers point of view-once more the mutility of criticfsm-but cherish 1 a private belief that Miss Sinclair has | been at pains to specialize in the de- | testable. It certainly gives enormous scope to her talent
 Mary Divers life, as sketched in s rapid series of episodes, progressive | and cumulative leaves you with the | impression of having watched her for 45 years through the wrong end of
 an opera glass in which you have 1 seen her remotely but with good l measure of distinctness. She never | comes anywhere near as close as the l minor characters, but you know her nevertheless. Whether you like her or not again depends upon your personal 1 bias. Certainly you are forced to sym pathize with her, whether she is writh-
 ing in the sharp bangs of adolescence, | or in the claws of spiteful fate; and l you close the bow with a feeling of 1 satisfaction that the climactaric is l evidently deferred and that as she is still young, like many other intelli- ] gent and active women of today at the age of A. she may. yet meet a man who will really compel her to fall l in love with him. Indubitably she was
 not in love wit hthe last man, despite her surrender No woman under heaven could be
 True, Mary Oliver did not. take to
 suffrage or even to authorship. until
 late in life, but she had an incurable | optimism and a buoyant philosophy ] founded on the somewhat vague pan theism of her early childhood, and ce- | mented by her conversion to the di- datic Germans She lived for the most part in the intellectual ether and
 finally achieved high measure oi self-hypnotism. during which she ban ished importunate desires and re- grets.
 I fancy this last phase of her de- velopment will appeal to many women Some achieve these same results by
 the self-hypnotism of prayer. Others
 by placing themselves through intense
 concentration in relation with what
 Spencer calls the Great Body of Force
 and dragging some measure of it into
 their own distracted souls. Miss Sin
 clair's method--I shall not give i
 awe dN-~iS iiiOic anu W hii'
 beyond the reach of the average wom
 an--Mary Oliver was a poet-is highl,
 to be recommended to the imaginative But whether we care for Mary per
 sonally or for the vast army of sharp
 ly accentuated people that come int,
 her life from first to last. no one vii
 deny. I fancy, that the book is fas cinating-and a valuable study of wha ! it is the fashion to call a cross-sectiol of life. One may wish that she hal l planted her selfish. subtle, shghtini mother--the most valuable character il } the book-with any one of her insuffer 7 able relatives, where the punishmen : would have been mutual and in the na 1 ture of poetic justice. and fared fort 1 to live her own life in the real world
 But then the great point in the bool
 would have been sacrificed. So W gladly accept her as we have her fin ally: still young. pretty and charmin F at the age of 47, her mother burie (and most of her relatives), launche
 and swimming with, long, firm, stroke in the precarious sea of literary Lon
 don Secretly I cherish the hope an belief that Jimmy, also young an
 strong-for has he not lived the out
 door life of a -bushman in Australia? 2
 and cleared of his unspeakable crime
 will return to London and marry hel
 That is too much to expect from Mis-
 Sinclairs brand of realism, but thos . things do happen in life, if not i Q books, and we are each privileged t :. finish story in our own way after tn !, author has done with 1t.
 THE MOON AND SENTENCE" 3 By Somerset Maugham.l George H. Do ran Company, publishers. New Tor city.
 | Tn "The Moon and Sixpence. 4the frs l novel since his "Of Human Bondage, s MT. Vaughan has done an audaciou n story or9the secret desires that afflic Q and glcrify humanity. No one, says a
 English critic, can ''doubt his daring a t a dispassionate realist."
 d The conception of Charles Strickland t fantastic. but it is done with such powe t of analysis that it overwhelms with Il = reality. The stock broker who after y years of married life walks off from hi d family for a career in painting and fina e ly drifts to the South Seas. where he doe ' rare and beautiful work while living a l. a savage. is a figure of extraordinary fa' . cination and eccentric appeal.
 d America has walked up suddenly to tf
 fact thai The Moon and Sxpence' is