SOURCE: “Beauty and the Beast,” in The Nation, Vol. 110, April 17, 1920, p. 522.

In the following essay, the reviewer provides a mixed assessment of My Neighbors.

Caradoc Evans seems to continue in My Neighbors his indictment of a whole people. It is an extract of ferocity that he flings at his Welsh fellow-countrymen. He sees nothing but lies and lechery, callousness and craft. Mothers still love their young even in Wales. But he describes such love in “A Widow Woman” only to exhibit more glaringly the brutishness of the woman's son. The stories are like blows—dull and yet fierce. By a mingling of scriptural phraseology with literal translations of Welsh speech Mr. Evans carries over into the very texture of his writing the moral contradiction against which, in reality, his cold fury is directed. That contradiction is an old one. Against it are aimed the arrows of all the...