The old Quaker's observation that every one but thee and me is a little mad, and thee is not quite above suspicion, might serve as a smug comment on the magnificent story of Wolf Solent. But its smugness would be untrue to the spirit of Wolf and his creator. Those aberrant impulses that lure us toward the bright circle of lunacy except no man, though many of us are too fearful to admit them to even our most secret thinking. But Mr. Powys looks wonderingly, without blinking, at the shuttles of shame, ecstasy, glory and degradation which cross and recross to weave the unique and mysterious pattern that is a human life. He grasps the shuttles with firm and sensitive hands, and the fabric of his book is rich and strange. It is at once as natural and as eerie as the phosphorescent wake of a ship breasting the waters of a midnight sea.

Externally Wolf Solent is the story of a man of thirty-five, who took refuge in the Dorset village of his forefathers when he had been rasped past the limit of his endurance by a schoolmaster's life in middle-class London. Chance and family influence had got him a post as secretary to the obscene old squire of Ramsgard to write a chronicle of the Dorset that was known to the bedposts in brothels, to the counters of barrooms, the butlers' pantries in old houses and the muddy ditches in old lovers' lanes. In Ramsgard he found love, marriage, friends, a home and a means of livelihood.

Below that current in deeper and more troubled waters runs the real course of the book. Wolf Solent was a sick man, harried by the demands that life made upon him. Into his sensitive and troubled soul experience intruded like the crash of a stone in a millpond, stirring up mud and debris, bespattering the water lilies. As he rode to Ramsgard in the train there floated between him and the green masses of the trees the phantom face of a man whom he had glimpsed on the steps of Waterloo Station—an English face, but also a Chinese face, a Russian face, "just the face of a man, of a mortal man, against whom Providence has grown as malignant as a mad dog."

Wolf himself knew the bite of the mad dog. He had had to leave London, because, two months before, in the midst of an innocent discourse on the reign of Queen Anne, some dam in his own mind had suddenly given away, and before his astonished pupils he danced what he called his "malicedance," pouring out a torrent of wild, indecent invectives on every aspect of the modern world.

As he looked out the window again there hovered before him a monstrous apparition of invention, a whole round world pierced and sullied by iron-clad motors like colossal beetles, its waters ravaged by the throbbing prows of relentless vessels, its air shot through by the stinging assault of airplanes. From this intolerable assault of noise and motion he had made himself a retreat. This obtrusive world could lay no finger on him. He had no urge to action, to literary or intellectual achievement. "He hid, deep down in his being, a contempt that was actually malicious in its pride for all the human phenomena of worldly success. It was as if he had been some changeling from a different planet, a planet where the issues of life—the great dualistic struggles between life and death—never emerged from the charmed circle of the individual's private consciousness."

When the stones became too troublesome he could sink still further below the waters of that pond, into a stillness where nothing could pierce, where his mind could unfold like the giant leaves of some fabulous tropic vegetation. This was his mainstay, his "life-illusion," the "reality" by which he lived, the refuge which the world so far had not been able to violate. That way lies poetry, and if one follow it far enough, madness.

The sore spot in Wolf Solent was a talisman whereby he felt—and suffered—the phantoms that pursued those other souls in Ramsgard who, there as everywhere else, pursued their courses in essential isolation, glimpsing only now and then the common sun over them, and the earth under their feet. Deny the village he could not; for its tentacles had sunk deep into him in the remote halcyon days of his childhood. Short of his own dissolution, they could not be dislodged. Bit by bit he realized and accepted them; first the elemental realities—the rain-drenched lanes and hedges; the Arthurian hills across which be plunged, alone or with the beautiful Gerda; and ominous Lenty Pond, which becomes the symbol of his struggle.

It was a legend of the village, which floated before him elusively for months, that each generation of the squires of Ramsgard had caused a young man to drown himself in Lenty Pond. The beautiful boy who had preceded him as secretary to the squire had died in bed, of double pneumonia, but it was believed that his spirit still walked the lanes, and his white face would float under the waters of the pond till another came there to take his place and let him rest in peace.

The Dorset village was like an old garden grown in on itself, roots intertwined under the soil, branches twisted grotesquely to reach the sun between overhanging leaves and stone wall. As Wolf for a time became aware only of the grotesqueness of the clasp of root upon root, it was a garden of malign ghosts. Beyond lay only the beckoning waters of Lenty Pond. The octopus of reality touched his "life illusion," grasped it, squeezed it dry and flung it aside. He was empty, defenseless, to himself degraded beyond all hope of rebirth.

But gradually from those roots he began to draw life. The phantoms faded and he saw that it was his own spirit that had painted them on the air. The people about him—the delicate and amazingly distinct gallery which Mr. Powys summons in the figures of Wolf's gallant mother; his lovely wife, Gerda; his "true love," the wraith-like Christie Malakite; the old squire, Jason; the poet, Darnley Otter and the rest; became not monstrous outgrowths, but natural and separate flowerings of forces which involved them all.

There was a night when Wolf Solent came near to slipping quietly into Lenty Pond to fulfill the destiny that seemed to be pressing in upon him. Then there came a day when he realized that his body had saved him, that the disease was in his own mind, and that that mind was what he had to reckon with. He would take as the talisman of his day 'endure or escape.' He had made peace with the world. Lenty Pond no longer could frighten him.

Possibly some such struggle as this is a universal price of an artist's existence. But beyond that, differing only in the richness and intensity of its nature, it is a common experience that lies unrecognized in less conscious spirits, one price of honest life and growth. In its reach and its grasp Wolf Solent transcends the reefs of mere self-pitying aesthetic agony on which many a lesser vessel of exploration has been wrecked. Will Durant calls the book "an organized 'Ulysses,'" In the beauty and freshness of its imagery and the sustained interest of its narrative its power is without question. Its prose often rises to the cadence of poetry. And beyond beauty, it sinks shafts through the unique personalities and provincial setting with which it deals, to a core of truth which is the stuff of human experience, whether in a cottage in Dorset or a furnished room on Manhattan Island.