Books

Radio Record, Volume II, Issue 13, 12 October 1928, Unnumbered Page

Books

THE CABALA.

Thornton

Wilder

HIS is an earlier book than the brilliant "Bridge of San Luis Rey," and its publication possibly is due to the instant success of that wonderful romance-a success that restored wavering faith in the literary acumen of the novel-reading public and rendered its ereator the literary lion of the moment. The Cabala is a small society of distinguished entities, who claim relation to the oldest aristocracy of the Imperial City of Rome; very great figures, indeed, at one period of history, but here presented with powers diminishing, prestige waning, and all the members soon to become effete. Much is yet retained, however, of the pomp and glitter surrounding scions of a great social order; many of them are gifted above their fellows, while others are so affected by the eccentricities of their emotions and morals that they overstep the borderline of sanity. One is struck by vivid characterisation of the qualities of these great and tragic figures; their recklessness, evanescent joie de vivre, and strange experiments in living conducted with the grand manner and gesture that strangely are denied to the worthy bourgeois. Tronical, artificial, tragically gay in their dream-like atmosphere of the past, the chronicler contrives to imbue his swift-moving puppets with some semblance of reality; the series of emotional episodes being strung together with such consummate art as to suggest a many-coloured string of jewelled words fantastically twisted on the chain of Mr. Wilder’s picturesque phraseology. A book imprisoning the legendary charm of a fairy tale, and bringing to mind one that fed and fostered many youthful dreams... "The Last Home of the Giants," it was called, and in its pages, for one small reader, lay spell of all pity and terror. In maturity it would seem that these later creations of a soaring fancy also are as giants in the land of imaginative romance; the story being narrated, with seeming simplicity and a quaint touch of everyday, by a nice young travelling Britisher, slightly perplexed to find himself in such strange company. Master of an ornate and accomplished style, Mr. Wilder also possesses a penetrative understanding of the human heart. In analysis of the charm of a fascinating woman, perhaps he comes as near as may be to definition of that baffling and enviable attribute. Listen to this, O ye highbrows! "She was one of the few intelligent people who truly wish to be liked, and who learn, among the disappointments of the heart, to conceal their brilliance. They gradually convert their keen perceptions into more practical channels -into a whole technique of implied flattery to others into felicities of speech, into the euphemisms of demonstrative affection, into softening for others the crude lines of their dullness." Which essentials in the gentle art of the subjugation of mankind are, by so many gifted women, not understood and neyer will be.-R.U.R,