Fiction

The Green Man Of Brighton
Clemence Dane Depicts An Age Of Reason
The Moon is Feminine. By Clemence Dane. (Heinemann, 7s. 6d.) Waiting for Joanna. By Adrian Alington. (Chatto and Windus, 7s. 6d,) Romany Love. By Gipsy Petulengro. (Methuen, Ss. 6c1...) Reviewed by FRANCIS BURDETT It would seem that Mr. Henry Cope lived at Brighton in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, when Brighton was still glorious under the reign of the Regent, and he was known as an eccentric and called the " Green Man." Little is known beyond this and yet it has been enough to fire Miss Dane's imagination.
In The Moon is Feminine she describes intimately, delicately, exquisitely what sort of man lay behind that strange exterior. He dressed in green, powdered his hair with green, lived on green vegetables, in a house painted and papered to represent a cave, dim, yet gleaming with reflected light. His family legend :told how two children "came from St. Martin's Land, that it was a green country, and -that they iti'd green rwitight," and that they themselves had "a greenish tint of the skin and wore outlandish clothes."
It is this inheritance that gives Miss Dane the chance that she has so magnificently taken. She portrays Mr. Cope with all his verbal brilliance, his social gifts and assured position, and yet the inability to make any true friend. He•is aware of this, half welcomes and half rebels against it. Nature in the form of a particularly violent storm threw him almost literally into the arms of Lady Molly. He knew she was stupid but involuntarily he was captured by something deeper and more intuitive than mere cleverness.
In this way the tragedy is staged. It is Molly's humanity against Mr. Cope's inheritance. An unexpected complication is introduced by the Merman, or could it have been merely a figment of the imagination. Nothing could be more charming than the conversation between these two. It is delightful to find so brilliantly conventional a setting, such brilliantly conventional wit, enhanced yet invaded by the threat from St. Martin's Land. How satisfying it is to find the Age of Reason depicted in its strength and with its weaknesses.
It is a pleasant experience to read Waiting for Joanna; to be carried along by the smooth, intimate, almost prosaic events that avoid extremes and stick to the conventional and yet somehow hold our interest and win' our hearts. Joanna and Andrew had loved from childhood. Life tore them apart and riveted that separation when Andrew became a tame and happy schoolmaster and Joanna, coerced by misfortune and family necessities, married a rich but tainted Baronet.
Andrew, as the story opens, waits in the cafe at Spezia, as he has waited through long years, for the coming of Joanna. As he awaits her. train his memories reconstruct their stories. But we know, too, Joanna so that we can balance true facts against his fond imaginings. It is a pity that so charming a story, so enticingly written, should be marred on occasion by a fashionable disregard for morals.
Romany Love is the first novel of Gipsy Petulengro, King of the Romanies. His story is along familiar lines. A deserted gorgio baby is picked up and cared for by a gipsy and his wife. Except for her eyes, her hair is dyed, Mirella the child becomes wholly gipsy in ideas and appearance, and the secret of her birth is not revealed until she is grown up. A short attachment to a gorgio, non-gipsy, is followed by a speedy disillusionment and the young woman returns and marries a gipsy.
What gives interest to the book is the considerable amount of gipsy lore which is included in the story. We are told about herbs and pronostications, tricks clever if hardly admirable, a loyalty to the tribe that is combined with the most conscientious depredations on those amongst whom they live. It increases our love, our admiration, and even our fear for this strange race. A book to be. read by those interested in the subject.