Wosax Trivwpnaxt. By V. Blasco Tbafez. (Constable. 75.)
The publishers' precis of this novel makes a startlingly different impression from the novel itself. It is no good or heroic quality in the great artist's vulgar, selfish, puling little wife.that revives remorse ful passion after her death. It is, as the author himself points out in his preface to the translation, an irenic study of the perversity of human desire, that can only appreciate the inaccessible. Josephina was a tragic choice for any genius. One constantly forgets her aristocratic origin, so completely suburban is her sour puritanism, her Mrs. Gummidge attitude to life. A less patient man would have left her in a year. The painter—an extraordinarily loveable, half-childish type of great man—endures her with angelic forbearance, unti] her taunts about his age and ugliness drive him to assert his power over one of the many women in his entourage. The repulsion of feeling that forces him after Josephina's death to idealize her memory, and revive her early beauty, seeking for ever for a mode] who resembles her,és- human enough, but no Sunday school moral' need be inferred, in spite of the author's earnest appeal to the British public not to consider his nevel "of doubtful morality." The book is curiously different from "The Four Horsemen," of international fame. It has the same sincerity and sense of drama; but it is, as it were, national and particular, where the other, inspired by a world-cataclysm, was cosmic.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.