ALTHOUGH Mr. Fisher has drawn the title of this, the second volume of Vridar Hunter's tetralogy, from George Meredith, he and his book own little else to Meredith's writing. Where "The Egoist" suggests and flashes, Mr. Fisher has sworn enmity to the principle of artistic selection; everything is written down and written through, however irrelevant or banal, and it is written simply. The result cannot be meretricious, there can be no temperamental flourishes, but one of the deepest of Meredith's lessons is that literary abases have a rich value all their own. What many critics have called the Biblical simplicity of Fisher's style is a characteristic that appears only in the best of it; a slight falter in Biblical simplicity can produce a very unBiblical dullness.

Mr. Fisher does succeed, in "Passions Spin the Plot," in keeping his straight-forward method at an unusually high level. Most of the irrelevancies are later reclaimed and justified; a clear continuity of impression has been preserved. Vridar Hunter, an Idaho farm boy, first of his line to enter the doors of a college, emerges from the second volume as a Wasatch alumnus; the record of his transformation is a careful, and a revealing, one. His problems are the old problems of youth; their setting has made them more intense and more bitter. Sex and ambition and disillusionment come sharply to Vridar, whose environment has not fitted him for their solution.

The district from which he springs, Antelope Mountain, is poor and frugal; its people are poor and frugal also, and their poverty is as much spiritual as material. The old problem of outgrowing one's own people, and with them one's early love, has been presented by Mr. Fisher with great power. In Vridar the impact of a new life has not yet been resolved; part of him can never be of Antelope Mountain, and part of him can not belong to Neloa Doole, whom he goes back to marry in the end, but he is closer to his own people than to those his college life brought him.

Mr. Fisher's naturalism does not stop before his characters. If the Antelope district, and the people who form its background, are painstakingly revealed, so also is Vridar, and his every moral pimple shines out to us. His lies are duly reported to us; we ever know each time that he lies to his diary. Every windy, youthful vaunt is, we are told, unfulfilled; if Vridar omits the payment of a laundry bill, every detail of the transaction is coldly and unemotionally reported, until the reader wallows in a sea of sordid insignificance. In Mr. Fisher's love scenes the words "ecstasy," "tenderness," and "delight" are literally present; but there is no love scene which does not end in recrimination and violence, no meeting of Vridar and Neloa which is free from physical horror, blows, screams, and tears. Naturalism in character portrayal, when it is essayed by a writer whose philosophy is as dark as Mr. Fisher's, must always become picaresque; the ideal hero may have lost his significance, but the actual villain is always with us.