BOOKS AND WRITERS.
Written in Friendship. A Book of Reminiscences by Gerald Cumberland. (Grant Richards. 7s. 6d. net.) Mr. Cumberland is as malicious in his friendship as he was friendly in his malice. He has certainly brought trivial chatter to as near a fine art as a passing acquaintance with interesting personalities and a somewhat feline literary ability could make it. He manages not to be dull, even when, as frequently, he is telling us nothing significant about people whom he has met in a bar or over a dinner-table. And this is because he is always revealing himself. His egotism is occasionally cheap, but it is always intriguing. He is a genius, we feel, who has consented to the superficiality of journalism, but may yet qualify for a finer destiny. The present book is not entirely confined to personalities, sketched with varying success from real illumination to the mere repetition of journal- istic formulas ; it contains more intimate chapters, too, on the difficulty of earning a living in literature without violating your artistic conscience (the returns being so singularly in inverse ratio to the merit) • on Mr. Cumberland's own experi- ences as a publisher's reader and his opinions on the modern novel. One chapter, too, is devoted to literary criticism. And here Mr. Cumberland in his treatment of " Q's " On the . Art of Reading, Mr. Galsworthy's novels, and Mr. T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood, in which he remarks " an extraordinary brittleness, even when truth is spoken," shows a subtlety of insight too often lacking in his impressionistic character sketches. Nevertheless, it will doubtless be for these latter that the book will be widely and on the whole deservedly read.
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