(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
Mr. FORREST REID is a writer upon whose progress I have for some time kept
an appreciative eye. His latest story, bearing the attractive title of
_Pirates of the Spring_ (UNWIN), proves, I think, that progress to be well
sustained. As you may have guessed from the name, this is a tale of
adolescence; it shows Mr. REID'S North-Ireland lads differing slightly from
the more familiar home-product, though less in essentials than in tricks of
speech, and (since these are day-school boys, exposed to the influence of
their several homes) an echo of religious conflict happily rare in the
experience of English youth. Mr. REID is amongst the few novelists who can
be sympathetic to boyhood without sentimentalising over it; he has
admirably caught its strange mingling of pride and curiosity, of reticence
and romance and jealous loyalty. The tale has no particular plot; it is a
record of seeming trifles, friendships made and broken and renewed,
sporadic adventures and deep-laid intrigues that lead nowhere. But you will
catch in it a real air of youth, a spring-time wind blowing from the
half-forgotten world in which all of us once were chartered privateers.
There are, of course, worthy folk who would be simply bored by all
this--which is why I do not venture to call _Pirates of the Spring_
everyone's reading; others, however, more fortunate, will find it a true
and delicately observed study of an engaging theme.
* * * * *
I must really warn the flippant. It would be appalling if admirers of
_Literary_ (and other) _Lapses_ were to send blithely to the libraries for
Mr. LEACOCK'S latest and find themselves landed with _The Unsolved Riddle
of Social Justice_ (LANE). And yet I don't know. Here is a subject which
even the flippant cannot long ignore. And a man of the world with a clear
head and a mastery of clearer idiom than a professor of political economy
usually commands has here said something desperately serious without a
trace of dulness. I should like Professor LEACOCK'S short book to be
divided into three. The first part, a trenchant analysis of some of the
evils of our social and industrial system, I would send to the
impossibilists and obstructives; the second, a critical examination of some
of the nostrums of the progressives, should go to the hasty optimists who
think that a sudden change of system will as suddenly change men, for it
contains much that they will do well (and now resolutely refuse) to ponder.
The third part I would return to the author for revision, for it contains
no more, when analysed, than an _ipse dixit_, and quite fails to show that
the evils denounced as intolerable in the first part can be remedied
without some substantial portion at least of the heroic reforms denounced
in his second. Also I would remind him, or rather perhaps the more
ingenuous of his readers, that there have been later contributions to the
theory and practice of new-world building than Mr. BELLAMY'S _Looking
Backward_.
* * * * *
_The Great Desire_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is a novel full of shrewd
philosophy and excellent talk. Mr. ALEXANDER BLACK sets out to prove
nothing, to justify no political or social attitude, but just to draw his
fellow-Americans as he sees them going about their war-time business, the
"great desire" being simply the thing that is uppermost in the mind of each
one. As a composite picture of what New York thought about the business of
getting into the War the result could hardly be bettered. One never feels
that latent antagonism which readers, even though they may agree with him,
unconsciously experience towards an author who seems to be arguing a point.
Mr. BLACK gives the extreme views of the blatant patriot, and of the
anarchist and socialist who cannot see the distinction between arguing
against war on paper and arguing against this War on the street corner. He
makes us realise the people who think only how to make the War an adjunct
of themselves and those who desire only to make themselves a useful adjunct
of the War. He draws his types cleverly and states the case of each one
fairly, but with a humorous restraint and from a standpoint of absolute
detachment. _The Great Desire_ has plenty of charm regarded merely as a
story, but I recommend it especially to those who are apt to judge the
Americans by their politicians or to assess New York on the basis of the
HEARST newspapers.
* * * * *
If it were only for his complete fearlessness in following well-worn
convention and his apparent reliance on his readers' ignorance or want of
memory, Mr. J. MURRAY GIBBON'S _Drums Afar_ (LANE) would be rather a
remarkable book in these psycho-analytical days. His hero actually has the
audacity to have blue eyes and fair hair, to start his career in the House,
and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in a
hospital, where his _fiancee_, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in
the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational
_cliche_. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which
no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in
one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on
leaving America, where he has become engaged to a wealthy Chicagan's
daughter, he quotes--
"I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more."
And, although the girl is annoyed, it is not on account of the citation.
Much of the story, however, deals with Chicago, and since my previous
knowledge of that city could have easily been contained in a tin of pressed
beef I can pardon Mr. GIBBON for being as informative about it as he is
about Oxford colleges. (He seems, by the way, to have a rooted contempt for
Balliol, which I had always supposed was a quite well-meaning place.) On
the whole, either in spite or because of its rather Baedeker-like
qualities, _Drums Afar_ will be found quite a restful and readable book.
* * * * *
Somewhere in the course of the tale that gives its title to _The Blower of
Bubbles_ (CHAMBERS) the character who is supposed to relate it denies that
he is a sentimentalist. I may as well say at once that, if this denial is
intended to apply also to Mr. ARTHUR BEVERLEY BAXTER, who wrote the five
stories that make up the volume, a more comprehensive misstatement was
never embodied in print. Because, from the picture on the wrapper,
representing a starry-eyed infant conducting an imaginary orchestra, to the
final page, the book is one riot of sentiment--plots, characters and
treatment alike. Not that, save by the fastidious, it must be considered
any the worse for this; even had not Mr. BAXTER'S hearty little preface
explained the conditions of active service under which it was composed,
themselves enough to excuse any quantity of over-sweetening. I will not
give you the five long-shorts in detail. The first, about a German child
and a young man with heart trouble, shows Mr. BAXTER at his worst, with the
sob-stuff all but overwhelming a sufficiently nimble wit. My own favourite
is the fifth tale, a spirited and generous tribute to England's war effort.
(I should explain that the book, and I suppose the author also, is by
origin Canadian.) This last story, told partly in the form of letters to
his editor in New York by an American officer and journalist, has all the
interest that comes of seeing ourselves as others see us; though I could
not but think that the narrator erred in making the haughty _Lady Dorothy_,
daughter of his noble hosts, exclaim, on the entrance of a footman with a
letter, "Pardon me, it's the mail." So there you are. If you have a taste
for stories that make no pretence of being other than fiction pure and
simple, limpidly pure and transparently simple (yet witty too in places),
try these; otherwise pass.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Pedestrian._ "DROPPED ANYTHING, MISTER?"
_Motorist._ "YES."
_Pedestrian._ "WHAT IS IT?"
_Motorist._ "MY GIRL."]
* * * * *
"UTOPIA.