Talk:The Song of the Sirens and Other Stories

Reviews

The Nation 26 April 1919:

MR. WHITE'S impressive romance of Paraguayan life under the dictator Francia was followed by a rather strained and absurd romantic comedy of Rome. In his zeal to bring the past alive and to make us feel that Romans, even Emperors and Vestals, were real "folks," he gave them the manners of modern clubmen and boarding-school misses, and the speech of the more exuberant of these United States, at this somewhat later date. "The Unwilling Vestal" was unduly spun out; it had the makings of a sketch for the present volume. Seven of these ten tales are drawn from Greek or Roman life; "The Elephant's Ear," to be exact, is a story of Hannibal. This story, like "The Fasces" and "The Swimmers," frankly owes its idea to a quoted sentence from the "Strategematicon" of Julius Frontinus. They are all successful, but the last-named particularly so, in catching a dramatic hint from the sober lines of the chronicler, and reading life into it. Here is our cue for "The Swimmer": "Liburni, cum vadosa loca obsedissent, capitibus tantum eminentibus fidem fecerunt hosti alti maris ac triremem, quae eos persequebatur, implicatam vado ceperunt." The story-teller's fancy is roused by the question: What happened to the Roman captain who let his ship be coaxed upon a shoal and taken in this ridiculous fashion? Let the trireme be a whole fleet, the captain a young commodore, with his career before him, ambitious and a lover. What did the Emperor do to him? The answer we find in this narrative is romantic, but by no means impossible. The title-story links present and past—the tale of a crew who, adventuring in mysterious waters, fall victims to the deathless enchantment of the authentic Sirens of old, all but the stone-deaf man who for a time survives. The refreshing thing about these well-told tales is their non-conformity to the present American code of the short story. They do not remind us of the work of twenty other performers of this particular hour; their substance and flavor are their own.