Why has [Robert Hichens] not given us all that he promised? It seems that he has lost himself in an excess of analysis, in a vain effort to attain the inaccessible, which may perhaps be explained by his musical education and his essays in occultism.

In 1894 he published The Green Carnation, a cutting satire on the aesthetic and symbolist movement, which made him famous. An Imaginative Man (1895) contains a curious pathological study, and lays bare the lies of an artificial civilization. Felix (1902) depicts a young Englishman, enamoured of literature, who discovers Balzac's tailor, becomes famous, loses his illusions, and serves as pretext for a mordant picture of literary life in London. Who could divine in these ironic productions the future author of A Spirit in Prison? Flames, in 1897, had revealed the secret tendency of his mind. It is a story of occultism, curious, original and morbid. But there was nothing to make one foresee the sudden blooming of his talent about 1904, after a period of meditation and work. For him, as for many other contemporary novelists, those years between 1903 and 1904 are a date of capital importance.

In 1904 he published Tbe Garden of Allah, in 1906 The Cal of the Blood, in 1908 A Spirit in Prison. These three books contain the best of his work.

After this, Robert Hichens quits England and goes to Africa and Sicily in search of an atmosphere that is simpler, closer to nature, in which passion stalks nakedly. The Garden of Allah is the desert in the vicinity of Biskra; the love of a young Englishwoman for a Russian ex-monk; the mysterious attraction that Catholicism exercises upon weary souls. The Call of the Blood portrays a half-Sicilian Englishman, Delarey, who is led by the hereditary awakening of passions to betray his wife and to perish in a violent death.

The Sahara and Sicily are not merely the principal themes, they are almost the heroes of these two powerful books, which made a sensation in their day. A Spirit in Prison follows The Call of the Blood and contains an inexorable but interminable analysis of the effects produced by a moral lie, even though told in the best of causes, on him who utters it and on him who profits by it.

Since then, Mr. Hichens has written nothing that is reminiscent of these three books.