by Eden Phillpotts. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921, l2mo, viii + 433 pp. $2.50.
OFTEN a man who has successfully turned his hand to all sorts of voluminous writing suddenly gathers up his best bits of literary gear and puts them all into a novel. Phillpotts has done much more than that in his novels: he has not repeated himself — he has collected himself. Read Orphan Dinah, and you know the author’s range of fiction passably well. The only one of his moods that is not suggested at all is the spirit in which he and Arnold Bennett put their heads together to write Doubloons. Nearly everything else is here— the Hardy touches, the vivid descriptive chapters, even a line or two from early Phillpotts plays, never actually quoted, but constantly suggested. For example, when Lawrence says to Dinah, ‘ I knew . . . that there was nothing like working your fingers to the bone, to dull pain of mind and make you sleep,’ he does not quote, but clearly echoes, a line of Salome’s in The Secret Woman: ‘Work, I tell you. Work till your flesh aches and makes you forget your aching heart.’
Phillpotts uses again his favorite Dartmoor slopes and valleys, the geography of his West Country Pilgrimage, with its furze and laurel and heather, and its tall gray mediæval stone crosses along the ‘forgotten monkish ways.’ The scene is more than a stage-drop: it places the people and determines the emotional horizons. In this haunting country of moor and fern, where slender birch trees in autumn ‘leap upward to the last of their foliage, like woodland candlesticks of silver supporting altar-flame,’ the actors go very busily and simply into the complex and leisurely plot.
The book would make a striking drama. Six out of the twenty-odd characters are fresh and full-dimensioned: the old fox-hunter, the master of Falcon Farm, the horseman, the cow-man, the incomparable Soosie-Toosie, and Dinah. Before we see Dinah at all, we have heard her discussed by alt the other characters, who give their careful opinions of her delay in setting a time for her wedding; and before she appears, the tantalized reader is ready to rise up, take an approved ashsapling for a walking-stick, whistle to the black spaniel, and go stepping over to Buekland-in-theMoor, to call upon Dinah for himself.
People who like to trace Hardy in Phillpotts may amuse themselves by fancying Thomas Hardy at work upon the scene after the lover climbs Dene Moor and arrives at the gray shaft of Shepherd’s Cross. The moment has all the makings of a Hardy catastrophe, but it is without the Hardy lighting, the Hardy intensity— and without the catastrophe. The book ends, not upon a finality, but upon a question — a question about which only Thomas Palk, the cow-man. feels quite cock-sure.
FRANCES LESTER WARNER.