THE GOD WITHIN HIM. By Robert Hichens. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.
net.)—Mr. Hichens rather resembles the film impresario Mr. Cecil B. de Mille in that he is drawn irresistibly to choose imposing subjects from which to construct his stories, and to vulgarize them. Religion, for example, frequently inspires him. The Garden of Allah must have been easily one of the most successful novels of its period and, indeed, it has a spurious charm, and a considerable degree of merit as popular fiction not of the lowest order. However unreal his characters, they . live : however fundamentally false his psychological and dramatic values, they carry the reader along happily. But The God Within Him is an irritating novel. Its most important character is a mysterious Russian Jew called Peter Kharkhoff. So strong an influence emanates from him that strangers are drawn to his lighted window : deans in the full tide of sermon dry up and falter if he so much as enter a cathedral. He comes in contact in various ways with the principal characters in the tale—the heroine who is engaged to a young. fox-hunting Englishman, and Miss Creswell, engaged Runt. Kharkhoffs speciality,- apparently, is to put " thoughts " of an ennobling kind into people's_ minds. In other words the book is a wordy and ungracious rehash of The Passing of the Third Floor Back. But while we are asked to believe that this absurd person is a new 'saviour, his chief effect is in causing, or seeming to cause, the suicide of the hero who " unselfishly " poisons himself after he has been 'crippled fm life, in order that the beautiful, and frantically modern lmogen shall " not sacrifice herself by marrying him. Mr. lichens can hardly mean that suicide, even in such a case, is commendable. But unless he does mean this, the case for his new " saviour " is weak enough. Big talk about the soul and 'regeneration is not particularly entertaining to read in a novel apparently intended for entertainment" and
well larded with lush descriptions of the heroine's sexual impulses.
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