Which you twist around till you throw them out
In various shapes, such that each is clear.
Patterns of sound: some soft, some you shout;
Some are round and soft or dimpled and thin,
Some writhe and quiver fantastic about,
Some slip through the lips, and turn whispering in,
Till the waves of silence shut them out.
So, if we could not hear any sound,
But could see air moving like waves in a pond,
And the shape of every word had been found
Till they faded away in the air beyond,
And words came twisted in breaths of air,
You could tell each one by a careful stare.
The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase:
There is as much of beauty in one breath
As there could be upon the largest star!
He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself
about
These three last years of fraudulent
Subconscious plagiarism,
For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural.
A CHALLENGE. By MAITLAND HARDYMAN, Lt.-Col., D.S.O., M.C. Allen &
Unwin. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace,
was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at
twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard
of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not
merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation,
was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived,
fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe
in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But
it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often
comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry
in the book is _Via Crucis_, which begins:
Lord Jesus of the trenches,
Calm, 'midst the bursting shell,
We met with Thee in Flanders,
We walked with Thee in hell;
O'er Duty's blood-soaked tillage
We strewed our glorious youth;
Yes, we indeed have known Thee,
For us the Cross is Truth.
POEMS OF THE DAWN AND THE NIGHT. By HENRY MOND. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._
6_d._ net.
"Youth's a stuff will not endure," and in a year or two Mr. Mond will
probably not be talking of storming the battlements of Heaven, and will
not care to begin a poem with
An aged filthy hag, with bloated face,
Upon her haunches, wrapped in bloody rags,
There squats Bellona--splashed with entrails--
--words which do not really horrify us, and did not really horrify him.
He shows certain gifts. There is observation at the end of _The Silver
Corpse_, and in parts of _The Fawn_. But he strains after effects and
misses them. Honest vision and honest feeling may be later discoveries.
He would do well, for a time, to subject himself to a strict discipline
formally.
NAPOLEON. By HERBERT TRENCH. Oxford University Press. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is a cheap reprint of Mr. Trench's play, previously published at
10_s._ 6_d._ net, and recently acted by the Stage Society. With the
exception of _The Requiem of the Archangels_ and one or two other poems
it is certainly the finest thing he has done. Unfortunately the finest
things in it are probably those which are least suitable to the theatre.
ATHENIAN DAYS. By F. NOËL BYRON. Elkin Mathews. 2_s._ 6_d._ and 1_s._
6_d._ net.
Mr. Byron seems to have read the classics, and is obviously fond of
Greece. The unfortunate moon has been compared to many things; this
time it is a beckoning courtesan. There are few notable blemishes about
Mr. Byron's poems; but he never ends them properly, and it is seldom
clear why he begins them.
ANY SOLDIER TO HIS SON. By GEORGE WILLIS. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net.
A volume of lively verses, some of them in the military vernacular. The
speaker in the title poem, after long service in the trenches, sums up
his feats thus:
I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun,
I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum,
I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum;
I never borrowed money, and I never lent--but once.
Not a bad record. The conventional poems at the end are competently
written; "Bed" has something of the neatness, and something of the
allusiveness, of Prior.
THE STATION PLATFORM AND OTHER POEMS. By MARGARET MACKENZIE. Sands,
2_s._ 6_d._ net.
"These Verses are not all sad--indeed, I hope that in a very real sense
none of them are that." They are poems of sorrow and consolation,
decently worded and written with a sincerity and simplicity that is
sometimes moving. The author has a habit of being _too_ simple. It
takes some time to recover from a beginning like "I think maybe the
souls of men are bulbs."
ECHOES FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By J. G. LEGGE. Constable. 2_s._ 6_d._
net.
Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and
comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on
the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that
given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many
of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a
self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached
in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no
translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always
smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what
is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of
Thermopylæ.
NOVELS
JEREMY. By HUGH WALPOLE. Cassell. 7_s._ net.
THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 7_s._ net.
POOR RELATIONS. By COMPTON MACKENZIE. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By BOHUN LYNCH. Secker. 7_s._ net.
SEPTEMBER. By FRANK SWINNERTON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.
TIME AND ETERNITY. By GILBERT CANNAN. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
RICHARD KURT. By STEPHEN HUDSON. Secker. 7_s._ net.
The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms
of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who
have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail.
The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers
concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is
within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose.
Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good
deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are
they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up
to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a
popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd
of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in
time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening
to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?
It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development
or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate
one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned
by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its
extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his
hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion,
conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final
medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's _Jeremy_
is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why
he should have written it.
Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game,
searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate
under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him
with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached
him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her,
said:
"Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?"
"I don't care," he answered gruffly.
"It isn't any fun without you." She paused and added: "Would you mind
if I stayed here too?"
"I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her,
determined, as he was, that she should never know it!
"I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed with that melancholy
stare through her large spectacles, that always irritated Jeremy, out
across the garden.
"I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I
can't get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate
the Dean's Ernest?"
A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted
by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book
is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same
scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy grew older
he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in
rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the
material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable
child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to
bear the weight of this exhaustive description.
Mr. Brett Young's less unusual design gives him better opportunities
for the use of his talent, but not often the opportunities his talent
deserves. He came into notice a little later than that younger
generation which we have mentioned, and in some ways his gifts are
superior to those of any novelist of his own age. But it is a matter
for doubt whether they are strictly the gifts of a novelist. In the
row of his books, all sincere, all well written, all with obvious
merits, the best is undeniably his account of the East African
Campaign, _Marching on Tanga_, the second his collection of poems,
_Five Degrees South_. In these two, landscape and his delight in it had
an uncontested supremacy. In his novels up to now that supremacy has
been contested by the characters, who have, however, faded away in the
end against the background like puffs of smoke. This certainly allowed
the author's best talent to be displayed at advantage, and yet it is a
doubtful recommendation of a novel to say that the persons in it can
hardly be noticed.
In _The Young Physician_ the persons are not so unobtrusive, and the
hero, if we had not been aware of him before, would have forced himself
on our attention by committing manslaughter in the last pages of the
book. He does, however, live and move before that, and the characters
around him at home, at school, at the university where he studies
medicine, are living and moving human beings. But the more clearly we
see Edwin and his surroundings the less, very unfortunately, we see
of those poetical qualities to which we have grown accustomed in Mr.
Brett Young. Certain of the human relations are indeed very well drawn.
Edwin's love for his mother and his grief at her death make moving
passages. The episode in which he is drawn closer to his lonely father
is excellently done. But the second part of the book, where Mr. Brett
Young voluntarily confines himself in North Bromwich, is not, on the
whole, a distinguished piece of work. Here the author is without his
hills, trees, and clouds, and is compelled to exert himself in the
observation and delineation of character. But though he does his work
here cleanly and honestly, as we have a right to expect from him, he
does it lifelessly and without enthusiasm. "W. G.," Boyce, even Rosie
Beaucaire are alive and credible, but it is hard for the reader not
to suspect that Mr. Brett Young takes but little interest in them and
impossible, with that suspicion in his mind, to take much interest in
them himself. Much the best part of the book is the description of the
journey made by Edwin and his father to the deserted mining village in
the Mendips, which had been the father's home. Here Mr. Brett Young has
his opportunity for description and uses it well in a dozen passages.
And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the
scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts
to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of
the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip:
the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of
Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it
might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that
swam beyond in the grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasms
Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered;
more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy
plain of the Severn's upper waters that he had seen so many times
from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in
that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water
within the memory of man. And more than all this ... far more ...
they were the home of his fathers.
This quotation does not indicate, a dozen such could not exhaust, the
grace and charm of the episode in the Mendips. Here, perhaps, for a
moment in the midst of an unsatisfactory book Mr. Brett Young has
attained a higher level of achievement than ever before. His persons
do not here fade into the landscape, but rather blend with it into one
picture, of which they are as essential a part as the hills and clouds.
There is still, it must be confessed, a certain lack of vigour in the
presentation, but if the author could compose a whole book in this
manner it would be a very fine and remarkable performance. Perhaps he
may still do so. It would be very rash to decide at this moment that
the novel is not the form of art which he ought to pursue. But even
if we reserve judgment on this point, there can be no doubt that the
scheme of _The Young Physician_ is in any case not well adapted to his
particular gifts.
Mr. Compton Mackenzie, however, who invented and popularised this
kind of novel, has, in his latest production, thought fit to drop it.
It was indeed desirable, after the unfortunate affair of _Sylvia and
Michael_, that he should attempt to break new ground; but we think that
many of his admirers will read _Poor Relations_ in a mood of pleasure
mingled with dismay. One critic observed of _Guy and Pauline_ that the
future of the English novel was, to a quite considerable extent, in
Mr. Mackenzie's hands. But the future of the English novel does not
really lie in the direction of rattling books for railway journeys,
where humour is derived from cows, comic clergymen, and an overwhelming
hair-wash. Those who fixed Mr. Mackenzie with solemn expressions of
expectation on the ground of _Carnival_ and _Sinister Street_ will
probably be hard put to it to know what to make of this romping and
boisterous piece of work. It contains little more of what the author
has been praised for than his vitality--which was much diminished in
_Sylvia and Michael_--and his verbal ingenuity. But it does show high
spirits and an eye not blind to those obvious humorous effects, such
as bad wine, mischievous and inquisitive children, the nervous author
with his secretary, and so forth, which when they are whole-heartedly
embraced are, after all, still humorous. If the future of the English
novel really is in Mr. Mackenzie's hands and if he continues in his
present mood, the English novel is going to have a queer time of
it. But if he has done nothing else, he has proved himself free of
priggishness.
Among these novelists only two, Mr. Swinnerton and Mr. Lynch, much
concern themselves with what was once an urgent topic of conversation,
with the business, namely, of giving the novel shape and compactness.
This, it was at one time announced, was the direction in which English
fiction was moving, and perhaps it is still the most significant
movement, though it is accidentally a little veiled at present. But
Mr. Swinnerton, who is a novelist pure and simple, who follows no
extravagant theory, has no doctrinaire axe to grind, seems bent on
making shipwreck of his powers. Some novels can be written, as was
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, in six weeks. But Mr. Swinnerton has not
yet written a novel like _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, nor does it appear
probable that he will do so. He seems to have fallen into the habit
of producing a cross between a good book and "the commercial article"
in good time for the autumn publishing season once a year. Thus are
the hopes raised by _Nocturne_ disappointed; and those who were
disconcerted but cheerful last year under the stroke administered by
_Shops and Houses_ will possibly falter in despair this year under
the more poignant blow of _September_. It is the theme of a beautiful
woman, whose placid life does not flower into passion until she is
nearing middle age. Cherry Mant, who hardly hurts Marian Forster by
tampering with the affections of her good fellow of a husband, wounds
her deeply by making off with her youthful lover, Nigel Sinclair; and
both acts of rapine are cleverly introduced by a silly joke about the
name of a brand of cigarettes. It is true: Mr. Swinnerton knows his
business. And if he has not the final fusing fire of genius, he has
talent in great quantities, experience, and knowledge and cleverness.
He has learnt his art, but rather than apply his learning he gives
us once a year the irritating phantom of a good book. His theme and
his conception of its treatment are excellent. But he will not pursue
sufficiently deeply his researches into character, and unless he can
resign himself to missing the season now and again, he will be lost to
the English novel. His is not one of those talents that shine in rash
and careless brilliance. It requires intensive labour to make the best
of it.
The same judgment applies with equal force to Mr. Lynch's talent. The
difference between him and Mr. Swinnerton is that he has taken the
trouble to make the best he can of his theme, which is exiguous and yet
sufficient. The story turns on Jimmy Guise's gradual discovery of his
wife's worthlessness; and the hasty reader might complain that in a
short book Mr. Lynch has spent a great deal of time over a very small
matter. But those who range through contemporary fiction, anxious to
be hopeful, will be more interested in the care which he has spent
on every facet of the tale. The device, by which Jimmy is at once
presented, full length and in detail, to the reader, while Blanche is
gradually discovered, is one of those solid and sufficient inventions
which immediately command respect. The exact and measured discovery
of her worthlessness takes place by slow, inexorable degrees which
show that the author has never once relaxed his vigilance over his
composition. There are, it is true, irrelevancies even in so short a
work. Jessie Carruthers was not really necessary as a foil to Blanche.
The "New Department," though it is deliciously sketched, takes too
prominent a place. But these irrelevancies do not noticeably distort
the general scheme, and are in fact probably the result of Mr. Lynch's
unconscious recognition that his plot was a little too slender for even
so brief a novel. But, in spite of this initial difficulty, _The Tender
Conscience_ is a very creditable and satisfactory performance and gives
grounds for looking forward with much interest to Mr. Lynch's future
development.
The novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Stephen Hudson are of the
sort in which an attempt is made to simulate distinction by gratuitous
eccentricity. Some painters, in order to improve the landscapes with
which nature has provided them, screw up their eyes until the scene
before them runs into a confused blur. Mr. Cannan and Mr. Hudson
make this grimace before the spectacle of life. It is a fashion like
another, but it has less usefulness and, we imagine, less durability
than the novel of adolescence.
Mr. Cannan's book contains a gentleman named Perekatov with a "massive
Jewish face, thick, sensitive lips, a heavy blue chin, and tragic,
short-sighted eyes," another gentleman named Stephen Lawrie, whose
characteristics are not so obvious, and a young lady named Valérie
du Toit, who appears to be the incarnation of all that Mr. Cannan
considers glorious. The thesis of the story, so far as we have been
able to discern it in the gyrations of these and other characters, is
that the true England was not in the war, but sat unheeded, forgotten,
alone, in a little garret until the fighting was over. Mr. Cannan is
plainly dissatisfied about something, but he lacks a brain sufficiently
clear to make the reader understand what it is or what he wishes done.
Meanwhile he creates unreal scenes of physical and mental misery and
squalor through which the stoutest hearted could not drag themselves
unyawning or undepressed. Their yawns and their depression are, it is
true, in some sort a tribute to Mr. Cannan's powers. He creates these
scenes with a certain vigour and finish, but his qualities will be for
ever wasted unless he can raise himself out of his present state of
aimless gloom.
Mr. Hudson, perhaps even more than Mr. Cannan, has forgotten the
limitations imposed on him by his material, which is life. In this
story of Richard Kurt, his shallow and philandering wife, Elinor, and
his crafty young mistress, Virginia, he seems to suppose that nothing
more than his bare word is needed to carry off impossible events
and unnatural psychology. But the novelist's task is not so easy as
this. He cannot secure originality by willing it or by producing an
unexpected situation out of the void. The unusual situation must be
justified, not only by itself, but by all that has preceded it. The
novel effect which is obtained by suddenly altering a character already
defined is below childishness. As for the rest, this is a tale of the
idle and indigent rich and their experiments in adultery. Richard
Kurt appears to be a perfectly worthless person, so irritating in his
sins and weaknesses, that it is easy to understand the feelings of
his disagreeable father and his frivolous, selfish, restless wife.
Virginia, unfortunately, does not in a strict sense, exist. The maiden,
whose one desire it is to be seduced without appearing to consent or
even to be aware of the incident, may live somewhere in the case-books
of the pathologists; but Mr. Hudson has not delivered her from that
prison-house. He tells us that such was her behaviour and such her
motives, but the reader involuntarily declines to accept the assertion.
Nor is it likely that the reader would much care if it were true.
OVER AND ABOVE. By J. E. GURDON. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This is a curiously naïve and artless story of the adventures of an
airman, as seen through the eyes of one Warton, whom we meet crossing
to France for the first time and leave going back to England on
transfer to home service, with a Military Cross and two bars. It is
written with evident knowledge and covers most of the typical incidents
in an airman's life at the front. It is written, too, with complete
sincerity, and it is easy to discern the author's personality behind
the speeches of his characters and his own asides. Yet for all this it
is hardly a success, hardly so convincing or informing as a number of
books that have been built on a much slighter foundation of first-hand
knowledge. The fights described are not clear or lucid, the persons
introduced never become real. All this goes to show that both some
natural gift for, and some practice in, literary composition are
necessary for any book as well as experience of the life it depicts.
THE NEW DECAMERON. By VARIOUS AUTHORS. Blackwell. 6_s._ net.
_The New Decameron_ is a fascinating title which covers a disappointing
book. The greatness of the original Decameron springs, after all, in
the first place from the extraordinary beauty of the introduction,
which sets the reader in a proper state of mind for the stories that
follow and which lingers with him ever afterwards if he reads a story
here and there at random. But the state of mind produced by the setting
here, in which a miscellaneous collection of rather disagreeable
persons is becalmed in mid-Channel in an excursion steamer, by no means
recalls the magic of the Tuscan garden. The stories vary greatly in
quality, but none of them is entitled to be considered very seriously.
The best would make pleasant patches in our magazines, and the worst
would be bad anywhere. The jokes at the expense of German dullness
in the "Professor's Tale" are made with neatness and point. _The
Stone House Affair_ is not a bad detective story. _The Upper Room_ is
a decadent effort of a somewhat antiquated kind, but it is not too
ill-written. There is no reason why these stories should not have been
both written and published. But the great name under which they are
announced and the elaboration of their frame make them seem perhaps
more insignificant than they really are.
THE REVOLT OF YOUTH. By CORALIE HOBSON. Werner Laurie. 6_s._ net.