In a prefatory and explanatory note, John Cowper Powys rejects as not 'equivalent to reality' Matthew Arnold's famous Greek 'word for it', spoudaios, 'having the utmost seriousness'. Actually, that is exactly what his new novel has. It is wholly serious, in the French (or Greek) sense. And often very funny, in any sense, or none. For in it he sets out 'to defend the crazy ideas of mad people—in so far, of course, as they don't run to homicide or cruelty—against the conventional ideas of sane people'. Why the 'of course' proscription of homicide and cruelty? Children, primitive people, and the insane are all naturally cruel because their experience cannot comprehend the 'other' person or thing: there