Sano, Hanks. By John yon Wiliam Masefild iteinemann. Bp. 832. 7s. 6d. met.
"For if bold tars are fortune sport," sang Dibbin, "still are th fettane''s care" Wortune plage thousand and one tricks rd Harker. But at about page 320 she members her duty of care and tion "of "rough-houses," desperate escapes, desert wanderings, crooks, guns, Knives, tortures, and all the [abominations and desolations of the [dago world Mr. Masefeld, returning to fiction after 14 years, has shown a richness of invention "that will eave most of cur dealers in the heroic and the horrible fairly gasp-with envious admiration. The scone may he roughly described as [Spanish Main Street—it ie Santa Barbara of the nineties, whither majesty of sail, where blood flows lavishly behind' closed doors, and ginger is excessively hot, in the mouth. Sard Harker is mate of the Pathfinder—Captain Cary;..he has got his name from a sardonte tarn-of mind, and is the remote, ascetic seaman of " romance. He dreams and knows by prescience that a girl who invades his sleep will be found in a certain hous Las Palmas. The story's of landing, missing his ship, and finding, after tremendous buifetings by fall the storms of dagoism, his dream-lady chained to the stake by a priest of evil. What Mr. Masefield has done is to take all the elements of a serial in the "Boy's Own Shocker" and piece them together with the reticence of the artist who is not excited by the colour of the blood that flows but by the world in which it gushes, Mr. Masefield knows that the way to stir emotion is not to show Ht. His method.is as steely as the temper of the indomitable "Sard," and he never puts the whip to his style in order to force an effect. The result is some of the flowers of narrative. For sheer pressure of effort and despair his nero's passage of a swamp is superb. The poet Is everywhere at work, not merely pointing the tale with an occasional sonnet or snatch of sea-song, but encrusting it with the jewellery of phrase that has been scoured and polished by the fastidifous mind. But what we gain in the hot cut and thrust of action we lose in psychology. Sard Harker, being.
blend of dreaminess and derringdo, invites the author's full range of creation and the reader's most zealous attention. But he hardly gets it; there are times when one can hardly see the man for the fly ing Knives and bullets, and when he has to make a new escape from death in almost every paragraph it is inevitable that he should shed humanity and become a kind of self-starting mechanism of flawless accuracy for tumbling out of danger as neatly as he has tumbled into it, "He is so much fortune's sport and fortune's care that his personality dwindles to an abstraction, But if "Sard" is elusive, and the lest of evil an odd firment of Mr taut and field's st and carries with it all the swift, sheer beauty of strength in action, moving Ike one of the clippers in its pages—Manchester-Guardian."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.