FICTION
PRE-TCHEKHOV
Signs and Wonders. By Ellen Thomeycroft Fowler. (Hodder and Stoughton. 7s. 6d.) In Mr. Donn Byrne's Ireland one longs for rain. It is an Ireland of perfervid and reiterated raptures. " The late hazy June twilight " is " in it," " coloured him an almond blossom," a mower singing at his work is in it, whose song, unlike the Highland reaper's, is so plainly audible that every word floats in at the window, the great window, and very well suited to the occasion the words are ; a Lord Chief Justice of Ireland is in it, who says of a woman, " Isn't she a roaring beauty and a great singer ? I heard she was in all the operas of France . ," pacing to and fro with a nosegay in her golden shawl,_no doubt, Yes, a shower with a wind behind it, a horizontal shower with a sharp point to the tip of every raindrop, is what Mr. Byrne's over-rotund, over- perfumed, over-coloured, over-noisy talent needs. Talent, however, Mr. Byrne certainly has. He gives us, if not character exactly, clearly perceptible outsides to his characters. He embodies his people if he does not endow them with souls. He has the gift of inventing incident ; he is eloquent, vigorous, racy ; his chapters end like " curtains " on the first night of a successful play ; and his emotional energy rises to real poetic feeling, at any rate whenever he mentions the Holyhead boat.
Cease to criticize, yield to Mr. Byrne, and you will find yourself enjoying this world in which Irish hunting girls address themselves, like "Abbey" peasants, with : " Isn't it yourself is the fool of the world, Connaught O'Brien, to be grooming yourself like a racing mare, and not a man to tell you you're the fine elegant woman ! " this world• in which.sunlight is yellow as yellow wine and faces are like white flowers or else are heart-shaped ; in which there is conspiracyi and bigamy, and a projected duel between a just man and
the man who has wronged - his sister, and a villain who is burnt alive owing to his own trickery and villainy in the
big flaming house he has dishonoured-a villain with a par- ticularly well-cut coat and a red beard.
In Mr. Cosmo Hamilton's .stories the man of the world and the heart of gold are poised against one another in the balance. Mr. Hamilton is workmanlike and gay, and he can be also very, very sentimental. Then he presents to us such horrid sights as the eleven-year-old heir to a peerage, with large blue eyes and ruffled golden curls, addressing a burglar as " Mate " and giving him the contents of his money-box. Mr. -Hamilton does not often let the heart of gold down so heavily as this, however, and the gayer and the less sentimental he is the more we like him.
Miss Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler tells a number of ghost stories in her new volume. Some of them have a quiet effectiveness, " The Pass of Tubberneering," for example, which suggests that they are true stories retold. In others, Miss Thorneycroft Fowlers slightly facetious manner puts her reader into the wrong mood for stories of this kind.
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