for me when I am alone, but to pack a large girl into it with all her clothes on, and then to pack an overgrown vast bullock of a man like Fergus into it also, cannot be done. I made but one resolve that night, that on no account would I be pushed out of my own bed, and I was not; but every time that Fergus closed an eye he fell on the floor and the girl woke up and screamed."

outlines of the epic, Stephens has escaped longwindedness, that pitfall of so many who have essayed the same kind of task.

ARTHUR Moss.

begged the king's pardon. "How did Emer behave?" she asked.

"She went to sleep," said Conachur sourly. "She slept hard and kicked for seven long hours; and this I know, that if she has the round knee of a woman, which she has, for it was thudded into my back a thousand times, she has also the sharp elbows of a girl, so that after a time it seemed to me that there was a bundle of live bodkins in the bed. I never knew how long a night could be until that night: and we had even to prolong it out of courtesy to the lady! I shall keep a painful memory of that sweet girl until I die . . .

The battle scene in the last few chapters is stirring tragedy. In it are the elements of a greater moving picture than has yet been filmed. Deirdre, her husband, and four valiant companions, defy the forces of the king. While battering-rams pound, and slings and arrows fly, the beleaguered heroes leap in and out the six great doors in desperate sorties. In sudden treachery, one goes over to the besiegers. But the others fight on till fire is brought against them, In one last magnificent rush they break almost to complete freedom when magic called forth by the king's father overcomes them, and they proudly and nobly go to their doom.

The reconstruction of Celtic legends presents a formidable task for the modern writer, inasmuch as such fragmentary records have come down. But James Stephens has taken a skeleton scenario and through his magic evolved a powerful and beautiful tragic tale. Though he has faithfully followed the

(Our Dead Selves. Anthology of the Lowly, by Paul Eldridge. Boullion Biggs, 1924.)

E

XCEPT in rare instances, Paul Eldridge's poems have little sensuous charm, and frequently none. Even his finest poems are more properly mosaics of idea than harmonies. He can produce a harmony, but he seldom troubles to do so. The engrossing interest for him is thought. His kinship is with such mentalities as Whitman, Leopardi, Emerson, rather than with those carnal creatures for whom the formal art of poetry existed as a thing in itself-Heine, Milton, Horace, Catullus, say—whose evident purpose was to produce in addition to their ideas a gratuitous beauty of form. With the sensuous art of poetry Paul Eldridge has little to do. His strange and unusually fine work is valuable intellectually. He is interested in the high art of expressing thought, the art of ideas which interested Plato, Montaigne, Voltaire, and the great line of imaginative geniuses who have woven beauty out of conceptions ranged in order and sequence or merged into strange unities. Paul Eldridge is primarily critic of life and life we know only through images. The art of ideas, which will be the ultimate art on the eve of man's extinction or apocalypse, is unquestionably more worthy the attention of a rational being than any other, and it is more serviceable by far

in the spiritual evolution of man than the beauty of perishable forms. We will always, and rightly, honor Plato above Pindar, Whitman above Poe, Blake above Beardsley and Leonardo above Raphael.

It is in the field of ideas, the field of personality, in the great uncharted waters of symbolization in which all literature, fine art, and behaviour merge the field of expression-that Paul Eldridge is a striking figure. He has relentlessly pursued the conception of futility and disillusion through a variety of images and woven a strange fabric of intellectual beauty to clothe the skeleton of pessimism which is his private bugaboo and which he reveres with as sincere an adoration as his Duck bestows on the "White Lady of Ducks." That his pessimism is correct, well-documented and demonstrable is undeniable. One objects, in the field of morals, to an apparent resentment against life on Mr. Eldridge's part. It is possible, after all, that life is our own invention. But the mass of images developed from the idea of pessimism by Paul Eldrige has an aesthetic value quite aside from the truth of his thesis. He is an artist in ideas.

"Our Dead Selves" is a symposium on the vanity of being in the form of post mortem reveries of half a hundred creatures other than man-including, as is highly appropriate, the giraffe, the ass, the hyena, the goose and the peacock. Many of these pieces appeared originally in The Double Dealer and All's Well. The following selections are representative:

After a farewell party, at which Mrs. Mouth, "clad in rich-hued creepers, was both looking and feeling her best," the family sets out.

The Mouths, having changed "their floral garlands for the more artificial fabrics of the town", arrive in CunaCuna, and are soon domiciled in "a Villa with a water-closet". Mrs. Mouth, "who after a lifetime of contented nudity, appeared to be now almost insatiable for dress", visits, with the girls, the shops and cinemas. "Prancing Nigger" amuses himself as best he can, while Charlie joins the group of boys at a Cantonese restaurant on the Quay. There is an earthquake and a Charity Fete (for its victims) at the Villa Alba, the home of Madam Ruiz, Cuna-Cuna's social Queen. Her son, Vittorio Ruiz, having previously "seduced" Edna, now installs her in an apartment on the

Avenue Messalina, while Miami, through grief at the death of her lover, Bamboo, by sharks, enters a convent. But Mrs. Mouth, ever optimistic, seated at the dinner-table with her husband, replying to his "Wen I look at our chillens chairs, an' all ob dem empty, in my opinion, we both better deaded," retorts: "I daresay dair are dose dat may t'ink so, but, Prancing Nigger, I am not like dat; no sah!"; and to his "It was a chuesd'y-God forgib dat po' frail chile."-"Prancing Nigger, I allow Edna some young yet for dat position; I allow dat to be de matteh ob de case, but, me good sah! Bery likely she marry him later."

In creating the Mouth family, Mr. Firbank has created as delightful a family as any in literature, and in CunaCuna,- "Cuna, full of charming roses, full of violet shadows, full of music, full of Love, Cuna . !"-surely, the most delectable city!

Mr. Van Vechten has written a very able introduction which he calls "An Icing For A Chocolate Eclair."

LOUIS GILMORE.