• Mona from a Glow lime. By Jane H. Nindlater.
London J. Nisbet sad Co. f0.]
sad—hence the sad books." To deny the capacity of thought- fulness to those who are in the main optimists is a highly dis- putable proposition. The demand for cheerful books may greatly exceed the supply, but no study of contemporary fiction can approach completeness which leaves out of con- sideration the services rendered to the reading community by such benefactors as Mr. W. W. Jacobs, or the joint authors of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. That Miss Martin and Miss Somerville are incapable of serious thought is sufficiently disproved by their brilliant tragi-comedy, The Real Charlotte, or that tragic idyll, Naboth's Vineyard. In any case, it is strange that Miss Findlater in reviewing the tendencies of modern fiction should have completely overlooked a depart- ment in which writers of her own sex have gained such con- spicuous success.
It is pleasant to find that Miss Findlater, while rightly condemning the excesses and extravagances of certain de- partments of modern fiction, is quick to recognise the points in which the present generation has improved on its pre- decessor. In particular, she claims that a notable advance has been made in the art of narration, including in the term all descriptive writing, and makes good her point by com- paring the diffuse and conventional style of early nineteenth- century writers with the vivid and illuminating imagery of Stevenson, Kipling, and Thomas Hardy. Here, however, she notes the danger of the exemplar vigils imitahile as illus- trated in the deliberate employment of uncouthly expressive words, the passion for onomatopoeia, the desperate effort to avoid conveying any impression of primness. There is good sense, too, in Miss Findlater's protest against the excessive leniency of, and indiscriminate use of superlatives by, modern reviewers, though we are inclined to think that she attaches far too much weight to newspaper notices. Nor can we alto- gether agree with her estimate of Jeffrey either in regard to his excellences or his limitations. Her reference to "poor forgotten Campbell" implies an inability to recognise that a poet may achieve immortality by two or three poems, as Campbell undoubtedly has.
We have not space to follow Miss Findlater into her dis- cussion of other phases of her theme, but must content ourselves with a bare mention of her excellent analysis of the evolution of slum fiction from Dickens to Mr. Pett Ridge; her plea for the freer acknowledgment in modern tragedy of the element of mystery, of the" great vague infinite background of the unexplained "; and her eloquent impeachment of the siren heroine. The volume is completed by appreciative studies of Borrow and Walt Whitman, and a comparative analysis of the methods of three great foreign writers of war novels,— Sienkiewicz, Tolstoi, and Zola. In giving the preference on the whole to the first-named Miss Findlater is conscious of taking a minority view, but adduces solid reasons for her pre- ference in the following sentence :—" The genuine War Novel is not really about men and women; these play a subordinate part in it; a nation is the hero we follow, a mourning wasted land is the heroine we grieve over ; the impersonal assumes personality for us—we hold our breath over the fate of armies, not of individuals." It is a pity that in her survey of the fiction of war Miss Findlater did not include some mention of the remarkable psychological clairvoyance exhibited in his earlier works by the late Mr. Stephen Crane.
" AMA_BILIS INSANIA." • Ma. Grri-xx will forgive us for taking the title of his first paper as an apologetic, and yet unashamed, description of our attitude as well as his own. Is there any other sport in the world where a man would gravely set forth a chronicle of small successes and ask us to follow them with interest, or where a reader will avidly devour a narrative with which he has no connection, and which can give him no technical assistance P For Mr. Gwynn does not tell of forty-pound salmon, or holocausts of sea-trout, or six-pounders caught with the dry-fly, exploits in whose chronicle there is an epic significance. Nor does he give much help to the novice in search of hints about tackle ; and, above all, he so disguises the names of his rivers and lakes that there is no assistance for the man in quest of new fishing-grounds. Imagine the • Mains Holidays By Stephan Gwynn. London: Macmillan and Co. Ds. ed. net.] But Mr. Gwynn's book is no mere chronicle of sport. It is the work of one who unites with the angler's zeal an eye for scenery and weather, a delight in country life and country character, and a gift of clear and delicate prose. He is an Irishman writing, with one exception, about Irish waters, and the lingering sentiment of his race is used to brighten some day of indifferent sport with a piece of folk-lore or a vivid little sketch of that compound of adventure, poetry, and craziness which is called the Irish gillie. In this way we get the excellent tale of "St. Brigid's Flood," a grim enough gory in such surroundings, and the delightful picture of Dan the salmon-poacher and Mr. O'Malley, the local great man, a picture which shows a truer insight into the conditions of Irish life than a dozen ordinary so-called "studies." The author's delight in the wild landscape of Western Ireland, with its tender colour and harsh contrasts, is so real and insistent that the reader grows infected with his enthusiasm, and the sternest disciplinarian among fishermen might well forget his proper ambition in such a scene as this
Beyond was sea and sea—bays to our right and to our left, and before us the limitless expanse in all its glory. Small cattle pasturing showed silhouetted against the blue—like antelopes they seemed, a part of the wild scene. In our ears sounded the wild screams of galls, and with these, far-off shrieks of small
ragged boys at play round a turf stack On and on we went over the expanse of golden green toward the cliff edge. Sea- ward was the broad field of blue, overlaid, in tracery innumerable, with a shimmering mist of sunlight ; at the horizon an undistin- guished brightness, neither white, nor blue, nor silver ; ethereal, aerial brightness, as of fairy milk. Above was fine-spun cloud weft that grew into gauzy drifts streaming across the blue. Blue was above us, blue below and around ; at our feet the un- broken spread of sunlit green ; all vague, all largo, till we reached the very cliff, and suddenly detail burst on us—the rock, sun-smitten, black, and savagely grand ; stretching out from it, the blue sea, dashed with white ; and just under our feet at the
cliff's base, green water, greener fax than any glass or emerald In a kind of rapture we looked down upon purest white, purest green, purest blue, that eye can behold, wrought into being by the great wash of the Atlantic, working in unison with the clean wind and clean sun of the unpolluted place. But the very heart of the picture was an eddy under the cliff's blackness, where blue, green, and white all blended and merged into one ludo- acribable glory of shot colours, such a painter's palette as was never seen on earth."
This is but one of many delightful pictures,—topaz-coloured pools among brown bogs, reedy lakes, wet green woods sloping to fresh seas, quiet shimmering tidal waters, for to the angler it is given to wait upon the moods of Nature and catch sudden and secret aspects of her beauty. There is always a recompense for infrequent fish for the man who has the eye to find it.
Mr. Gwynn's fishing has been done for the most part in waters where salmon are scarce, and the element of chance is stronger than on the Houma or the Tay. In such circum- stances an intimate knowledge of the stream is the only hope of success. In a very reasonable discussion on the respective merits of the wet and the dry fly, be points out that in much Irish fishing there is something of the precision of dry-fly fishing,
Previous page
