FELLOW - TRAVELLERS. By Horace Annesley Vachell. (Cassell. 12s. 6d.
net.) FELLOW - TRAVELLERS. By Horace Annesley Vachell. (Cassell. 12s. 6d. net.) When, at the beginning of chap. xv., we read "I warn my readers that this and the two following chapters can be skipped et discretion," let us confess at once, we skipped. Not all authors are so kind. If Mr. Vachell could be so garrulous and merely anecdotal when the subjects of his chapters were people like Paul Gauguin, Ernest Dowson and H. B. Irving, we shuddered to think what three chapters on shooting and stalking and hunting could be like. In fact, Mr. Vaclaell's method is so disarming (somewhere in this book he boasts that he prefers "to travel comfortably along lines of least resistance ") that one hesitates to cavil with the kind of fare he provides. Only it is disappointing to find that a novelist has nothing more interesting to say, of Dowson, for instance, than : "I met him in his sere and yellow days, but he must have been a charming boy, not cut, of course, to the Eton and Oxford pattern." The truth is that Mr. Vachell is at his happiest in dealing with people who lend themselves to the note-of-exclamation method, and his pages are full of such people. He does not wince before atrocities like "declining into anecdotage," "Her novel set Florence by the ears," and "More water, mixed with whiskey, flowed under my Bridge of Sighs." In fact, it is a strong light on the stuff of best-sellers that such a writer as Mr. Vachell should, in his memoirs, probe no deeper into the psychology of his " characters " than this admirable tittle-tattle does. Mr. Vachon lives in the New Forest, and just how closely he
has come into contact with the labourer there is shown by the kind of" dialect" he puts into- their mouths :—
" They comes to me an' asks me to farm part o' what they calls a deppitation. Lard love 'cc,' I says, 'I ain't got no closes fit for Lunnon town,' I says. 'Never you mind,' says they, 'do 'cc come along wP us.' An' I did. . ."
Upon which there follows, in unfortunate contiguity : "The dialect, difficult to reproduce in print, is disappearing, and with it is passing that Doric simplicity of mind so attractive and disarming.' -Only one picture stands out clearly in our mind: it is that of Oujda. For the rest, there is a page in the last chapter (Revaluations) that we commend to those purveyors of small chat who delight in the side columns of theatre programmes.
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