When two or three years ago Mary Butts published a first novel called Ashe of Rings the few who read it were at once excited by its talents and puzzled by its contents; for here was a truly strange, a memorably strange feat of imagination which failed somehow to make sense. There was much beauty in the writing; there was much eeriness about the atmosphere; there was individuality to the characters. But what was the theme of the book (if, indeed, it had one) or on what milk these people had been suckled or of what past crimes the estate of Rings was guilty, no one could tell.

Now Miss Butts has published her second novel and called it Armed with Madness—a more explanatory title than Ashe of Rings. For it is very much the same kind of book, and one feels relieved to find Miss Butts herself admitting the madness of her characters. It permits one to stop seeking for esoteric meanings and motives, and enjoy the book as a sophisticated and most exquisitely written fantasy. It permits one to take her practical-joking sadists, her malevolent old men, her brain-ravaged introvert, her volatile Scylla with just a grain of humor or imagination of one's own; and to feel that one is not one's self altogether limited in experience simply because the events of Armed With Madness seem unusual.

Armed With Madness is the story of five Englishmen and one girl during a week's life. Scylla and Felix are brother and sister, high-born and poverty-stricken, and Picus and Clarence are two friends and distant relatives who live in a house near by. These four, with an aloof, fairly normal man named Ross, constitute a kind of highly and diabolically sophisticated group, with their own code, their own geatures, their own recondite ways of making themselves understood. A sixth person, an American named Carston, comes down to visit them, and finds himself the intended victim of a strange practical joke thought out by Picus, an unscrupulous kind of sadist with a perverted sense of humor. Picus buries a cup in a well, brings it up with a sword, supposes it to be a relic, and invokes the symbolism of the Holy Grail. The appearance of this cup proves strangely upsetting and leads to all sort of emotions and happenings just this side (and sometimes just the other side) of madness. A kind of diabolic malice and subtlety begins its interplay among these people, with their queer attachments, their quick jealousies and their unconventional attitudes. Before the end is reached Scylla has been tied to a statue and pierced with arrows. Clarence has tried to commit suicide. Felix has gone to Paris and brought back a hungry young Russian noble, and Carston has had his eyes opened to things undreamed of in his philosophy.

There is really no key which fits all the events of this book, some of which have as stripped and sharp a reality as one remembers, some of which seem the product of oversubtilizing, and others of which are turbid and inexplicable. Throughout the whole book runs a note of cruel and decadent sophistication oddly in contrast to the freshness and brightness and beauty of the writing, with its amazing imagery, its clean, natural sensuousness, its occasional pregnancy of significance. There is no question that Miss Butts is a poet, and hardly more that she is a writer of often distinguished prose. And once you enter her world, if you can accept and appreciate it as a world unto itself, what goes on becomes exciting and unpredictable, Aldous Huxley and William Blake walking hand in hand, with what results one can perhaps imagine.