Very Small Talk WE are told by her publishers, among
other very interesting and relevant pieces of information, that Miss G. B. Stern lives "partly . near the house where Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows." This, no doubt, is a very considerable advantage, but the benefits are not immediately discernible in her coy and annoying little book, with its tinkles and winks and endless feminine twitters. A bad title—and this is an exceptionally bad one—rarely introduces a good book; and what we have here is yet another of those incautiously egocentric, mishy-mashy, random and rambling personal canticles for which "autobiography" is too honoured a term. Of course, there must be something pertinaciously catholic about anyone who liked Ivor Novello and who likes Jane Austen, and I am quite sure that everyone who knows Miss G. B. Stern likes her very much indeed, and with very good reason. She must be an admirable talker, briskly, birdily observant, with many excellent things to remember and relate; but these qualities do not emerge from this particular box of tricks. To conjure with names, however good the names may be, is no easy matter. But she is "under some compulsion" to write "these ragbag chronicles" every three or four years.
It is unfortunate that Miss Stern takes upon herself to patronise Robert Louis Stevenson ("this R.L.S. had an ear for sound"), that she retails her own musings upon her readings and her writings quite so seriously, that she describes "the Germanic language" as "ugly" and then produces a little wretch like "hot-making," that she thinks of D'Artagnan as "another Toad," that she is no better than other writers in failing to understand the meaning of "protagonist" (and she fails very conspicuously), that she will persist in being so snappily intimate with her reader, so girlishly abundant in the records of her own conversation, and so exasperating in the jerks, the quirks, the poppety-pop of slick little sentences presented with a paragraphic importance—horrid little space-makers. And, talking of sentences, the one which begins the chapter called "Dovetail" seems to have got broken off in the typewriter: it begins with an "If"; and, although I have read it very closely seventeen times, and have given it to literary friends for corroborative perusal, I have not discovered the clause to which "if" is related. And so what?, as Miss G. B. Stein says. But there is at least one line in the book which, though brief, is entirely satisfactory: "The End."
Mr. Brighouse is equally resolved upon breathing in the reader's face. We are reminded at every turn that he is the author of that very successful play, Hobson's-Choice, which, for all I know, is first- rate theatre. His book is mainly concerned with theatres and actors, and will be of some value for those who collect works dealing with - theatrical history. The chummy-chatty sentences are hare less of a hindrance, for Mr. Brighouse writes frankly in the style of a railway- journey talk, speaking of simple matters in a simple way and without an excess of playfulness. The cliches are tumbled out with a bland unconcern which makes them inoffensive. In his final chapter, where he says good-bye at the end of the jour ney, he is touchingly sincere. The obvious literary moral, clearly illustrated by each of these books, is that people who can write excellent novels and excellent plays may not be equally successful when they write about themselves, their views and accomplishments. The discipline of taste, and a sense of personal dignity, should here forbid the use of the mega- phone. It is much easier to -invite sixty-seven:people to dinner at Gugli's, and so to attract a reporter from the Daily Whatnot (as Miss Stern relates), than to write sixty-seven Sentences of tolerable English
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