Evening star., 1938-02-06

quirements Of picturesque story but.
once he had decided what he was
going to report and set his pen to
paper, he was truly a great one. His
vividness. his lucidity and his per-
suasiveness have seldom been sur
passed.
1t Is In this aspect that Prof. Suther-
land interprets him and the tale Is
not happy one. for Defoe's life was
a series Of failures. He engaged In
repeated business ventures, bringing
them to success, only to see them
crash; he entered on the service Of
various public men. only to lose his
place when his patron went out Of
the sphere Of influence. In every
crisis, he turned to his pen for re-
habilitation and, whatever else failed
him, that never did.
The present book Is well written,
lively and sympathetic. It is recon-
mended as an exceptionally good
biography.
THE DANGEROUS YEARS. BY Gill
bert Frankau. New York: E. P.
Dutton.
MR.. GILBERT FRANKAU, ever 80
often, writes a novel, He has
now quite respectable list of them.
They are in perfect taste. they are
generally long. they are serious, they
are earnest and they are unrelievedly
dull. This is another of them.
1t tells the story Of some nice peo-
pie, and tells it without a ray of irony
or humor. The heroine, the beautiful
and horsey widow Of baronet, has
somewhere in her past a sin. She
lives with magnificent virtue all
through the course of the novel, how
ever. and. considering the length of
the thing, one might expect such en-
during propriety to count for some-
thing. But, in the course of the story,
quite number of people of whom
the lady is fond get rather badly
treated by fate. And these mishaps
have befallen them, she concludes, as
a punishment to herself for that old
secret wickedness. She is very solemn
about it and Mr.. Frankau Is no less so.
One must conclude, therefore, that he
shares with her the viewpoint which,
otherwise, might be considered a trifle
egotistic.
On the whole, it seems safe to rec
ommend his book to anybody. If you
have no sense of humor you will be
impressed by its splendid trappings-
hunts, hunt balls, London seasons and
the like. And if you have. the por-
tentous gravity with which Mr..
Frankau deals with glaringly obvious
trifles will strike you as deliriously
funny. So there it is.
BOW DOWN TO WOOD AND STONE
BY Josephine Lawrence. Boston:
Little Brown g. Co.
MISS JOSEPHINE LAWRENCE in
her brief career as a novelist has
been conspicuously successful Con-
sequently it may be all wrong to hold
that she can be anything but fine
writer. Yet the reviewer does hold
such an opinion. She finds Miss Law
renee guilty of a sort of uninspired
cruelty in all her works. and productive
of little to Offset that quality.
For it is Miss Lawrence's habit in
her novels to take group of perfectly
ordinary, perfectly harmless, perfectly
stupid people and practice vivisectior
upon them. demonstrating how hel
characters are indeed ordinary and stu.
pid, demonstrating that again anc
again, demonstrating that and nothing
else. But what Of it? Why tramp
up and down upon the helpless? Why
bring in the elaborate mental cutlery
of the psychiatrist to operate upon
poor John Jones. whose little life is
of such simplicity that common sense
and sympathy Of average degree can
comprehend it all practically at q
glance? Why indeed? The reviewer
does not know unless it be that Miss
Lawrence has an analysts tempera
ment and is bound by the same limi-