FLUSH, Elizabeth Barrett’s cocker spaniel, is one of the most famous dogs in literary history. His mistress wrote two poems to him, referred to him again and again in her letters; he shared her invalid loneliness, lay unnoticed during those invigorating visits, those long conversations with Mr. Browning, and finally, at the crucial moment, was secretly hurried across the Channel to spend his remaining years in Italian sunshine, pestered, perhaps, by fleas, and made jealous by a human rival half his size, but honored always by the mistress he adored, and the master whom at last he had grown to love.
All this Mrs. Virginia Woolf describes with delightful and lively charm, and with her usual deftness in calling up a living picture of the past. I do not see how anyone can help enjoying her book, Flush, A Biography (Harcourt, Brace, $2.00). The story is admirably told; there is no one now writing in English who knows as well as Mrs. Woolf how to use her material, who can immerse her facts in so invigorating an emotional bath, or show them to us wrapped in so enveloping a glow. Flush, as well as the better-known personalities of his master and mistress, is made very alive, and if, at times, he ‘thinks’ in a more human than canine fashion, we do not mind, for only by making him do so has his biographer been able to succeed, as she so admirably has, in describing his environment and his life.
The book is, of course, a tour de force, to be taken as one of Mrs. Woolf’s lighter works. It is chiefly the style which makes it so entertaining and agreeable, and Mrs. Woolf ’s style is one of the most personal and easily recognizable of any now being written. To heighten the emotion by a judiciously placed adjective, to use repetition with a cumulative effect, to ask rhetorical questions that make for immediacy, to break the thought into dramatic short phrases and sentences — these are some of the tricks, and very successful they are, by which Mrs. Woolf’s writing may be known. ‘Mrs. Browning went on reading. Then she looked at Flush again. But he did not look at her. An extraordinary change had eonie over him. “Flush!" she cried. But lie was silent. He had been alive; lie was now dead. That was all. The drawing-room table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still.’ We can recognize the voice of Lytton Straeliey in the heightened words, ‘extraordinary,’‘strangely,’ ‘perfectly,’and in the dramatic brevitvof the sentences. (I is very effective; is it not also a little dangerous? Does it not make reality somewhat too dramatic, almost feverish?
Perhaps it does, but to our present ears the tone seems right. We need heightening, and emphasis, for the passing fhix levels out distinctions and discriminations. In both her essays and her novels Mrs. Woolf has tried to isolate the living moment against its shifting background, to catch the Mash of sunlight white for a second on the crest of the brilliant wave, before the wave crashes to flatten itself oil the sand. Flush is only a minor example of this attempt, but in its way it is entirely a delightful accomplishment.
Two other books on the same subject have recently been published. One of them. Two Pools, a Dog and a Hoy, by Frances Theresa Russell (Lippineott, $4.00), is an introduction to ihe works of Mr. aiul Mrs. Browning in the form of a short biographical sketch, followed by selections from the Brownings’ poems. It is competently done, and will probably interest younger readers who are new to the subject. The second book. Flush of It impair Street and Broadway, by Flora Merrill (McBride, $l.o0), is an account of two dogs: Miss Barrett’s original spaniel, and the animal of the same name and color who acted in The Barretts of Wimpale Street. The pseudo-diary of the contemporary Flush will entertain those who do not. care very much for realism in their accounts of animal behavior, while the selections from Mrs. Browning’s letters about the older dog will make his image, and the emotions of which he was the object, clear to the eye.
THEODORE SPENCER