14 JULY 1923, Page 20

FICTION.

MR. COPPARD'S TALES,

Mn. CoPRAnn is a born story-teller. He has a rich, whimsical, coloured style and one is aware of him, at the opening of many of his stories, settling down with gusto and a full con- sciousness of his admirable powers to the business of yarn- spinning. He is garrulous, without being diffuse, for all his garrulousness has its effect : it is the natural speech, we feel, of the honest countryman who is so often telling the story and sometimes giving himself away—sketching his own peculiar characteristics—at the same time. Such a gift must be the expression of a mind of similar qualities, and Mr. Coppard's mind is gay, vivid, and whimsical. He often looks at things from a slightly grotesque angle, a habit both delightful and dangerous. "It's strange," says one of his people, "how a man lets his tongue wag now and again as if he'd got the universe stuck on the end of a common fork." The habit is dangerous because it tends towards the fantastic and away from the serious, and is, therefore, inclined to intrude upon the serious at inappropriate moments : but it is also delightful, because it can produce delicious flights into the comic, or—as in that wonderful earlier story of his, "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me "—a tender and poetical blend of the two. It is not, therefore, because we do not thoroughly enjoy Mr. Coppard's fantastic excursions, but because we feel that he is also cut out for profounder work, that we welcome a tendency to neglect the fantastic side in the present volume as a wholesome sign.

The two most ambitious stories in The Black Dog are the tale of that name and "The Handsome Lady." Both have themes of deep human and psychological interest, and, if Mr. Coppard has not quite plumbed their full possibilities, he has at least written two admirable stories. "The Poor Man," too ,is full of pity and tenderness, and there are others, such as "The Man from Kilsheelan," in which Mr. Coppard's peculiar qualities find excellent expression. But if, as we have said, he is turning away from the purely fantastic, it is most noticeably at present in the direction of the comic. He can be richly comic, as indeed he has been in the past, for there is first-rate comic stuff in his earlier volumes ; but in this book there is finer comic work than he has achieved before. And how roundly and heartily he can do it ! In "The Devil in the Churchyard," a piece of full-blooded rural comedy, he builds • The Dlgek Dog. By A. E. Coppard. London : Cape. [is. 64. aet..1 up a comic situation and solves it in that type of orgeoua collapse of which Chaucer shows himself a master in Miller's Tale." The book, in short, is filled with a variety oi delightful stuff : no one who is interested in good writing in general and good short stories in particular should miss it. We hope, however, that Mr. Coppard, without sacrificing his other powers, will venture still further in the direction he has taken in "The Black Dog," "The Handsome Lady," acid one or two of his earlier stories, such as "The Hurly-Burly," and will explore the deeper complexities of mind and emotion. To do so he will have to keep a very careful hand on what we have pointed to as one of his most delightful but dangerous qualities —his gay and whimsical fancy.