The Yellow Book. A Selection Compiled by Norman Denny. (Bodley
Head. iss.)
IT is hard to imagine now that the innocuous canary-coloured quarterly from which Mr. Denny has made his selection could have caused such a furore in 1894. Provoked by Aubrey Beards- ley's drawings, the -Westminster Gazette actually asked for " an Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing illegal," describing the magazine as a mixture of " English rowdyism and French lubricity." With the genteel ghost of Henry James glooming up at us from its pages, we can only smile ; for the Yellow Book today wears an urbane, keepsake air. Mr. Denny's principle of inclusion has been to select those contributions possessing the charm of period taste as well as intrinsic literary merit. According well with such a criterion, we find Max Beerbohm's Defence of Cosmetics; tales by Henry Harland, Ernest Dowson, Baron Corvo and George Gissing ; and poems by Davidson, Symons and Yeats. Work which is both worth-while and strange to the average modern reader is that by Hubert Crackenthorpe and Ella d'Arcy, though the former might well have been represented by one of his realistic sketches rather than by a dated piece of merely competent polemic. Somewhat regrettable is the omission of Lionel Johnson's Tobacco Clouds—a rare and precise prose reverie—whilst Victoria Cross's Theodora might well have replaced the insipid audacities of Muriel Dowie or Stanley Makower. There are thirty-six plates of repro- ductions of the work of Rothenstein, Beardsley, Sickert, Steer and others.
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