THE MARIONETTE. By Edwin Muir. The Viking Press, New York, 1927. $2.50.

MR. Muir's first novel has something of the structural development of a fugue. Its main theme is the simple story of Hans, an idiot boy, who at first is feared and loathed by Martin Scheffer, his father, but when Emma, the nurse, undertakes to bring the two together on the occasion of the child's fourteenth birthday, there is an ensuing successful rapport, and she loses hold over her old charge. But this strain is supported by the introduction of a supplementary force, for Hans sees the marionettes play Faust, and these dolls soon people his world, absorb his life. Mr. Muir has used the intricate pattern of themal relationships in the fugal form upon which to base the coordination of his characters. There are the parallel situations in separate but allied planes, of Martin striving to influence his son, now clad in the costume of the puppet Faust, compared with Haas groping to move his own dolls as freely as dance the marionettes, and the complete harmonious development of each strand of story upon itself and upon every other strand is clothed in the descriptive melody of surrounding Salzaburg and the Tyrolean Alps:

Mr. Muir's analysis of the idiot's mind is more intense than the acuteness of a clinical report, for he sharply transmits to the reader the emotional reaction to large events, strained through a limited but unimpassive consciousness. He has maintained a changing balance of domination in the wills of his characters, and the movement of successive mutations of superiority and inferiority mark the progressions in the plot. Mr. Muir's psychology, symbolism, and philosophy are inextricably dove-tailed, while the constant flux of affirmation and negation in the mind of Hans may be capable of many interpretations. There is his constant desire for the confirmation of reality: "He doubted his eyes, and had to feel things with his hands to know them." There is his constant desire for the unattainable tranquility that intellectual and physical isolation partly affords. Walking in the quiet hill-wood he meets a salamander, and this abrupt intrusion shatters the entity of stillness, and suddenly there is a alarming multiplication of yellow and black terrors. There is his constant desire for the compact miniature, a reality which shall be in his power to encompass, robbed of the hostility of bigness. "Salzburg lay changed beneath them the castle was as tiny as a chessman the tossing shapes of the Baroque Kollibien Kirche so frightening from his windows seemed quaint and harmless here." And there is his instinctive impulse to divide personalities from their physical appurtenances, with the feeling of a preconceived ability to dispose of these forms within their foreordained niches. The overwhelming ramifications of the puzzling ideas of Relation, Appearance, and Reality, which are suggested by inference, may here easily disturb and amaze us, and yet remain on first reading upon a separate plane from the actual passage of these chronicled events. But a more leisured reflection upon the nature of this book may easily start thought coursing through the various strata of speculation from Gulliver and Mark Twain to Bradley and Pirandello. The terrifying enigma of the sanity of the insane or the falseness of reality leaves us with a shaken faith even in the surcease of our own transitory mutability. Herbert Spencer said "Not only is there a soul of good 'in things evil', but a soul of truth 'in things erroneous'," and Mr. Muir has provided us with another starting point for speculative exercise in the good and evil, the true and the erroneous.