SOURCE: A review of Capel Sion, in The Nation, Vol. 107, December 21, 1918, p. 779.

In the following essay, the anonymous critic questions the authenticity of Evans's bitter portraits in Capel Sion.

Not long ago a young Welshman signing himself Caradoc Evans electrified England, or at least the reviewers of England, by issuing a little “first book” called My People. It was a book of sketches about the peasantry of West Wales, a people who had not been used in fiction before. It possessed the prime asset, therefore, of a new local color, an atmosphere, which is a matter no longer easily to be discovered even in patchwork Britain. But it had something better than that, for purposes of electrification, namely, an absolutely God-forsaken view of human nature and an utterly unscrupulous tongue. Here is a combination “hard to beat.” Nobody but a reviewer can understand how refreshing a book like...