The New York herald., 1922-04-09

M II "
Harvey Ferguson" The Blood
of the Conquerors' has much of
the instructive artistry of the
Latin school,"
the young wife's indiscreet letter ~
following her to the Great W!.ite
Way and enjoying two weeks of
illicit passion in obscure foreign no.
tells and suburban roadhouses.
Because Miss Lulu Bett" is used
by to-day's critics and columnists as
a convenient standard of measure
ment. it seems to need a passing
word. To the readers who found a
rare and delicate literary fragrance
i'm Miss Zona Gales inimitable
Friendship Village" stories there
has always been something discon-
certingly incongruous in a beck like
Miss Lulu Bett" coming from the
same pen. For this book is not in
imitable; in spite OF its clever crafts
manship it is in tune with the times
that have begotten 1t; it is unpleas-
ant enough to find favor with people
who like such diverse unpleasant
ness as the books of Theodore
Dresser and Sherwood Anderson, and
it was not near enough to the inmost
heart of the author herself to make
her averse to changing it's ending at
popularl demand. But one knows
without being told that she would
not have changed the ending of any
Friendship Village" story.
Lastly, there are two insistent
notes running throughout the work
of all the younge-' writers-an in
herent pessimism and a calculated
salaciousness. In Brass" We leave
Philip Baldwin bemoaning that youth
and love are dead and that he is old
and disillusioned; IN This Side of
Paradise" our last glimpse of Amory
Blaine finds him with mo God in his
heart" and nothing but the pain of
memory and the doubt whether life
was worth while; IN the "Blood of
the Conquerors" our last glimpse of
Ramon shows him sitting on his
heels in the sunshine trying ineptly
to discover what had been the mat
ter; more acutely than ever he felt
the cruel guerdon of youth-the con-
trast between the promise of life and
its fulfillment." This attitude of dis
Illusion, of the uselessness of young
ambition, the Dead Sea fruit of at
tainment, is the closing text of nine
out of ten of the current books.
XIV.
When you listen, however, to the
discussion and comment going on all
around you it is not this note of
Encouragement thai you hear en-
phasized. 1t is the hidden morsel of
improperly, the daring wantonness
of action. the audacious freedom of
speech that is remembered and re-
peated. "Oh, no. some young woman
will tell you, II have not read the
'Briary Bush,' but ! know all about
the snoto bdth!" Readers forget
many things in the Beautiful and
Damned" but they do not forget the
honeymoon scene, where he fatu-
ously murmurs, MY wife," and she
counters with, Don't call me by that
stupid, commonplace name; call me
your permanent mistressi" And then,
OF course. there is the scene already
mentioned in "Cytherea," where the
heroine SO surprisingly cries aloud to
the man who is almost a stranger,
Il want to be outraged" For gen.
erations, an opprobrium has been at
tached to the French novel because
of certain frank episodes in Madame
Bovary." in "Bei-Ami," in the
"Rougon- Macquart' series. But the
French masters of fiction used their
frankness as surgeon uses his
knife, where the diagnosis demanded
it. Their sordid, ugly facts were
structural: remove them and you
spoil the fabric of the plot But our
own younger group insert here and