The Ninth Vibration
by . New York: Dodd Mead & Co. 1922. 12mo.
WHAT would imagination do without the Orient? Ever since the time of Kim, it has taken refuge there from our Western worries; and no one has swung the magic portals open more invitingly than has L. Adams Beck in this collection of stories.
Once within, we can take our choice of routes. We may visit a dream Japan, revel in little gray pots filled with iris, and see the glory of the Goddess of Mercy flash from the ugly countenance of a poor blind girl. We may betake us to China, land of ‘The Incomparable Lady’ and ‘The Round-Faced Beauty,’ and enjoy romantic satire demurely wrought, as the Pearl Empress or the August Aunt converses in a ceremonious manner which ought to be genuine if it is not,and which imparts a new flavor to human speech. Or we may choose India, and there find thirst assuaged at immemorial sources of beauty and mysterious peace.
The first two stories, which fill more than half the book, challenge comparison with the work of another moving worker in the occult, Algernon Blackwood. But they are more convincing. Blackwood loves his Alps, and once, in ‘The Centaur,’ he gave us the freedom of a noble dreamland of classic mountain; but, as a rule, his realism lacks distinction. Mr. Beck, on the other hand, is one ‘for whom the visible world exists.’ His method presents the vague and awesome charm of the Orient through a delicate precision of detail; the touch is firm and fine. Should we visit Cashmir, we might not be privileged to pluck the fadeless white moonflower; but we too could appreciate the boat-woman — could ‘look at the hundred rat-tails of her hair, lengthened with wool, and see her silver and turquoise jewelry.’ The effect of the writing is as of choice enamel, with translucent glaze through which strange forms are gleaming.
There is no flesh and blood in the book. The heroines of the chief stories might change race and name and no one be the wiser; the people are shadows. But, apart from the exquisite realism of the setting, there are fair glimpses to be gained of Krishna, the Flute-player. Can we trust the record? Are we shown, in these deeper ways, the authentic Orient? Few of us are competent to say. The author writes in an interesting page: ‘It is very clear to me that, in every land, when the doors of perception are opened, men will see what we call the Supernatural clothed in the image in which that country has accepted it’; and the question rises whether those doors will open quite in the fashion of the country to men of alien race. The writer of this book is in some ways frankly Occidental. He is saturated with his Browning, he does not scruple to quote Meredith, Mrs. Meynell, Irish folklore; and the allusions sometimes seem irrelevant to the atmosphere. Yet hybrids can be lovely; a Western mind, infatuated with the East, has a quality of its own; and the passages quoted always are in the same ‘ vibration ’ with the rest.
Mr. Beck has written a delightful book. It has dignity, restraint, and a sense of fun; it not only chronicles but reveals beauty. The treatment of the occult is free from the exotic mawkishness which often spoils stories of reincarnation and of ancient deities beheld by devout emancipate eyes; it rises above the usual level of the psychic tale which achieves a facile thrill, not through the quickening of spirit but through the titillation of nerve. For the author observes his own caution: ‘Remember always that the psychical is not the mystical, and that what we seek is not marvel, but vision.’
VIDA D. SCUDDER.