Fiction
An International Batch 7s. 6d.) WREN Jack became as good as his master the novelist was obliged to abandon one of his most accommodating conven-
tions—that one in which the tragic loves of his aristocratic hero and heroine were paralleled by the grosser and merrier wooings of their servants. Contrast and pattern were there ready-made for the novelist, by this device of telling the same story on two planes, the lower emphasizing and underlining the higher. So valuable indeed was the device that it could not be dispensed with, and it is interesting to see the old pattern appearing in new disguises in the first three novels in this list.
Herr Heinrich Mann's version is by far the most ingenious, and his book is an excellent display of charm and virtuosity. He has taken the story of the Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III at the point of the disaster of Sedan, and has reproduced it in the lives of a prosperous German provincial Consul, his romantic French wife, and a fraudulent speculator who has enveagled the Consul into his financial gamble . The scene is in a small German town. The time is the 'seventies. The name of the Empress is on everyone's lips, and the Consul's wife, dazzled by good fortune, living in fanciful dreams, and scandalously given to flirtation, resembles the Empiess so perfectly that a play is written in which she is given the Empress's rofe,while the fascinating speculator takes the part of Napoleon. Absurdly and dangerously romantic, she lives in the part she is rehearsing until she convinces herself that the speculator's destiny and hers are tragically linked like the
Empress's and Napoleon's. In a world of dreams she is on the point of entering into a liaison with him. Herr Mann
`knows how to give his work an air-of theatricality, and one 'cannot praise too highly the grace, adroitness and economy with which he has successfully accomplished a most difficult task.
Mr. Morley's Rudolph and Amine is really two stories tele- scoped, and it must be reckoned a fairly amusing failure. He has taken the singularly futile tale of the first American musical comedy, called " The Black Crook," which caused a stir in its day chiefly because the ladies wore tights,_ and has turned it into a kind of novel. The result is that we have Mr. Morley with his tongue in his cheek being laboriously facetious and arch at the expense of a play that was too sweet a nothing of the theatre for translation into story form.
Neither Herr Maim nor Mr. Morley have done more than engage their fancies. Mr. Bullett, with commendable ambition, has exercised his imagination, but it is not great enough to encompass his scheme. • He tells a story of incest, first in a primitive Sussex when the sons of Koor ranged the forests like beasts ; and then, by a leap in time, he finds a roughly parallel story in the Sussex of the eighteenth. century. The flint axe of Ogo the hunter which, in the hands of his eighteenth- century successor precipitates the final tragedy, is the link between the ages. But what a baffling, inconsequent book Mr. Bullet has written ! The episodes in primitive Sussex are magnificent, swift in narrative and throbbing with excite- ment. The succeeding eighteenth-century part has some beautiful and exciting passages too, but • it is patchy and stagey. The " quaint " talk of local worthies in the village inn, the sudden rap on the inn door, the handsome stranger who comes in shouting about " this benighted place," the garrulous innkeeper, the beautiful and doubtful lady—we have seen all this in the Beaux' Stratagem, The Man with the Load of Mischief, and other costume pieces. But what it is all doing in Marden Fee, and from the pen of Mr. Bullett, I cannot see. Yet the book ought to be read for its scattered excitement and the freshness of Mr. Bullett's prose. The individual chapters are good even if the sum is disappointing.
Mr. Strong writes also of " quaint " people if you like, but they are not cut out of " tuppence coloured " cardboard. They are flashing figures caught in the net of memory. They live in the intense and lovely sunlight which shines upon the reminiscence of a happy childhood. I think The Garden is by far the best book Mr. Strong has given us. It is an unqualified triumph and it is written about a people, a scene, a life which he understands with hig blood. Here is the Dublin sea coast of thirty years ago and the good, decent l'rotestant middle class who lived by it. Seen through the eyes of a visiting child who came from England- every -year for his holidays, they were idle and genial saints. Every summer there was for the child the same joy at arrival, and the same dead sadness at parting from a scene of idyllic happiness. It is hard to know how to indicate the quality of so rich a book. Certain episodes stand out for their fine, lively and vital narrative power : the grand eel-fishing episodes off Kingstown harbour ; the swimming race ; the high drama of the shooting of a marauding cat. There was a wonderful excursion to Dalkey island in a boat, with Uncle Ben in the bows " looking for breakers." But how can one capture the limpidity of dialogue, the richness of character, the merriness of the comedy, the delicate rendering o' the continuous growth of a child's mind, and the living vividness with which the scene of harbours and mountains is described? I do not know if Mr. Strong has made me drunk with delight by plying me with the magic of a world I know well, but there are passages in this book which to my mind might claim a place beside the childhood pages of David Copperfield.
Simpson, the life story of a " Nanny," and the account of
_ her progress from nursery to nursery until her death in the German revolution, is a careful, subtle, but colourless book. Every show of passion and emotion is as gently and firmly ruled out of it by the author as Simpson would have ruled it out of her nursery. She is unquestionably a real character most faithfully drawn, but, except when she looked after an albino child, she had no very interesting charges, and rarely did anything to warrant such a devoted account of her life. Mr. Sackville West knows, of course, how to write with sensitiveness and dignity, but his book is too desperately faithful unto the good and unremarkable Simpson to be mojc than dull.
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