It is still her method which interests us most in Miss Katherine Mansfield's new stories, and that is both a good and a' bad sign. Method in art is crucial, and therefore the concern Miss Mansfield's arouses is hopeful, yet our admiration has to reflect that without something else the most brilliant method is futile. There are stories in "The Garden Party" (Constable, 7s. 6d.) which it has not lifted @bove the ordinary; "Her First Ball" is one. It gives an impression of originality to "Life of Ma Parker," but at the sacrifice of truth to that Life, for Ma Parker could sense it as here she is made to only if she regards it through Miss Mansfield's eyes, which of course. she cannot. Where method and idea chime, as in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," or where, as in "At the Bay," it elaborates and illuminates the idea in a series of parallel impressions, the effect is not merely brilliant, it is satisfying. And with her remarkably liberated and sensitive observation Miss Mansfield could, with selection, be satisfying every time.
Certain adventures in Burmah of a Miss Darya Molineus are told in "The Green Moth" (John Murray, 7s. 6d, net), by G. E, Mitten and J. G. Scott. Darya's un-conventional position in Burmah, living with her native foster-mother, Mah Pah Ao, and to some extent adopting native dress and habits, makes them possible, and the circumstances of Tom Marjoram explain tum, more or less satisfactorily, as head and source of those murders and kidnappings. It is a brisk and catching tale, but its special merit is due, of course, to Sir George and Lady Scott's intimate acquain@nce with the country and its native and white Official life.
Readers who start upon Mr. Charles H. Crichton's "Tales of Love and Hate" (Mills and Boon, 7s 6d. net) will be well advised to persevere with it. Our suggestion is not that early pieces like "Pietro" fail to be readable. That, on the contrary, is too wholly their merit, whereas later numbers, such as "The Fusilier' and "The Snakebite," show something more, and better. A point about the volume is its travel range; in connexion with which, note the tale of The Dancing Pasha," true, and hapening within twenty miles of europe.
Given a jealous and passionate temper like Geoffrey Poynder's and a lady of so restless and emotional a nature as Rachel, his wife, the tragedy of "The Tent of Blue' feasible. Hugh Tresham, Rad el's (Duckworth, 7s. 6d. net) is luite lover, was doomed; so was her husband; and she is left staring out of the window with unseeing eyes in the stillness of death until they fix themselves on a patch of blue sky, "the tent of blue' That consoling reflection identifies the Desert as the conspicuous. element in a quite but ordinars tale. rococo, into which Lady Dorothy Tt is a frame, @ little massive and Mills fits a series of picturesque
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.