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THE TIME OF MAN—Elizabeth Madox Roberts — Viking Press ($2.50). It is felt at once that this book was a long time in the writing; that, now it is here, it constitutes a distinguished contribution to the abiding literature of this continent. It must have grown, as it grows upon the reader, like a vine of bittersweet or wild grape covering a stone wall. It is similarly eloquent of Nature, similarly unobtrusive, hardy and humbly fair to behold. It is the story of a Kentucky hill child, Ellen Chesser, groping instinctively through a scrawny, vagabond adolescence, with no attention from her roaming, horse-swapping, white-trash parents. The father settles as a tenant-helper on tobacco farms and Ellen's maidenhood is more stable. Her lanky, hungry little frame rounds out and her nature, though always puzzled, sensitive and secretive, is opened by friends, security and small domestic possessions—a heifer, a bed. She suffers through an inconclusive courtship by a yokel with a good heart but no "spunk"; welcomes marriage with a muscular, free-spoken nomad of the hill-farms, Jasper Kent, whose children she bears and beside whom, as their narrow fortunes rise and fall, she lives on, always the self-reliant child of the roads at heart, trusting only her own being as the total of reality it is given man to know in his time. The writing is fibrous yet delicate—again like a vine. The author, a mature maiden lady, is little known, save for a volume of children's poems (Under the Tree) called "graceful," "clear," "candid" by Critic Louis Untermeyer.
"Half God, Half Beast"
BELLARION — Rafael Sabatini — Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Mr. Sabatini's new hero is but a few hours out of the convent where he has grown from a nursling to huge-thewed manhood, when he finds himself racing through the footways of Casale with angry pikemen after him. He pauses by a studded door like the Sire de Maletroit's door in Stevenson and is vastly relieved to find it unlocked. Within is a tawny-headed damsel who, after she has concealed the handsome fugitive, quite alters his plan to study Greek at the University of Pavia. No lady of Renaissance Italy so fair and mettlesome as this Valeria but was meshed in intrigue from her dainty toes to her pearl-sewn caul. And no stalwart like lucky Bellarion but would have rejoiced as he to exchange a philosophical career for swordplay in her service. This swordplay, these daggers by night and poisoned wine-goblets; a Milanese tyrant blood-hounding men for sport; a hundred delicate situations saved by Macchiavelian wit or pretty compliments; and Bellarion, "half god, half beast," rising to power and at last claiming the lady—these are swiftest, richest Sabatini, than whom no sword-and-cloak man is more deservingly remembered, in the public's orisons.
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