SOME RECENT FICTION.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2378, 6 February 1915, Page 4

SOME RECENT FICTION.

A CERMAN BACKGROUND. Two rocently-publislicd novels, each of «o small literary importance and excellonce, possess a Gorman scenario. These aro "Tho Encounter, 1 by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Mrs. Do Selencourt), published by Edward Arnold and "The Pastor's Wife" (G. Bel! and Sons), by the author of that ever delightful book, "Elizabeth and Her German Garden." Mrs. Do Selencourt, whose fascinating study of feminino egotism, "Tante," rill be remembered by many of my jfiadflN) aow. cwaya & daring expert

ment. Tho egotistical, morbid 1 , intensely conceited, and, to tell the troth, very boresomo German philosopher, Ludwig Welilitz, who loves, or imagines lie loves, a young American lady, who is a professed "intellectual," is evidently intended as a twentieth century portrait of the famous Nietzsche, with whom he certainly has a most intimate resemblance by reason of his long-drawn Btxwtings as to the "Will to Live," the "Supremacy of Self," etc. ltivals _ litter-day Nietzsche for tho affection of Miss Persis Fennamy are a big blonde beast—the phraso was originally Nietzsche's own, and applied to an Englishman—Graf von Ludenstein, and a deformed, but, as schoolboys would say, "quite dccent" little philosopher, Conrad Sachs. Persis tires in time of the Nietzschian person's combination of philosophic discourtesy and amatory inclinations, and is perilously near to falling a victim to. the frankly sensual onslaught of Von Ludcnstein. Sachs, by far the best of the Teuton trio, rescues the heroine from Ludenstein, bus devotedly effaces himself when Persis would reward his attachment by her hand, and so tho Btory ends with Miss Fennamy remaining unwedded. The heroine's mother is sketched with much Ironic humour, and there is an elderly, lazy', and slovenly Italia;! woman, who must surely have been drawn from a. life model. Mrs. De Selencourt knows her Germany and her Germans as dp few English" novelists, hut all _ her wit and. cleverness cannot reconcile me' to the intolerable dullness of the speeches she places in the mouths of the '.hroo Teuton "intellectuals." When lngeborg Bullivant—her grandmother was a Swedish lady—informs her father, the Bishop of Redchester, that she has met a German Lutheran pastor on one of "Dent's Excursions to Switzerlandj" and has agreed to marry him, the episcopal and pnternal dismay, plus a. touch of suppressed wrath, was perhaps excusable. But lngeborg persists, and is duly married to Herr Dremel, who unites a mania for the study of scientific manure* with the official expounding of a narrow-minded Calvinism. With Tier more than middleaged Teuton husband, tho young English woman goes to a far away East Prussian village, where she bears children—six of . them—to the manure specialist, and incidentally finds her life almost unendurable. i At last she goes for a well-earned holiday, and meets a famous English artist, who opens up quite a now world to the tired, worn-out woman. Just as philandering is about to develop into something quite serious, the somnolent British moral conscience awakens, and lngeborg returns to' her East Prussian home and her pastor and manure expert—that gentleman, still as'ever quite unconscious of all interests outside those of theology plus scientific manures, remaining blissfully unconscious of the dangers his wife has undorgone. Such is a rough and very brief outline of the story unfolded in her latest hovel, "The Pastor's Wife" (Bell and Sons), bv the witty author of "Elizabeth and Her German Garden." It is a story which, I fear, will not be greatly,' appreciated in Eastern Prussia!

I am afraid most readers of Georgette Leblanc's (Madame Maurice Maeterlinck) story, "The Choice of Life" (Methuen and Co.), will find it a tepid and uninteresting production. The story deals with an experiment made by a highly educated French -woman, who takes a beautiful peasant girl away from her humble, almost sordid, home, and introduces her to her Parisian friends "and to an entirely new social atmosphere, only to find that the girj, bo far from rising to the level of her now environment, remains sluggishly, almost hopelessly; commonplace. ' The story was, I should say, written with a view to expounding • that "higher feminism" of which, before the war, one heard' so much, but not even Madame Maeterlinck's charming literary Btyle—the story is exceptionally well translated—can make it otherwise than an unsatisfying, and, to bo frank, a rather dull production.^