revailing
_odium bellicosum_. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace,
and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a
freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the
common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a
distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. LAWRENCE'S method.
It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or
exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of those
stories is a story in the accepted mode. They are studies in (dare one
use the overworked word?) psychological portraiture. I don't know any
other writer who realises passion and suffering with such objective
_force_. The word "suffering" drops from his pen in curiously unexpected
contexts. The fact of it seems to obsess him. Yet it is no morbid
obsession. He seems to be dominated by sympathy in its literal meaning,
and it gives his work a surprising richness of texture.... I dare press
this book upon all such as need something more than mere yarns, who have
an eye for admirably sincere workmanship and are interested in their
fellows--fellows of all sorts, soldiers, keepers, travellers, clergymen,
colliers, with womenfolk to match.

* * *

On a map of the North you may be able to find an island named after one
_Margaret_. It should lie, though I have sought it in vain, just about
where the florid details of the Norwegian coast-line run up to those
blank spaces that are dotted over, it would seem, only by the occasional
footprints of polar bears. Anyhow it was so christened by two bold
mariners who lived in the _Spacious Days_ (MURRAY) of QUEEN ELIZABETH.
That they both loved the lady (ELIZABETH, of course, too--but I mean
_Margaret_) may be assumed; but that they should eventually, with one
accord, desire to resign their claims upon her affection must be read to
be understood. I for one did not quarrel with them on this score. For
had not their mistress in the meantime found companionship more suitable
than theirs? Besides, if even the author is so little courteous to his
heroine as to invite her to appear only in two chapters between the
third and the twenty-seventh, why should two rough sea-dogs--or you and
I--be more attentive? And indeed it is a correct picture of his period
that Mr. RALPH DURAND is concerned to present rather than a love story.
In the writing of the love scenes considered necessary to the mechan