FICTION.
KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS.*
IT is commendable in Mr. Belloc that twenty years ago he discovered how good The Wallet of Kai Lung is ; and now, in gratitude, he has dashed off a preface to its successor, Kai Lung's Golden Hours. Much of this preface will offend all who desire thoughtfulness and lucidity in critical judgment. To commend by contrast is natural ; but Mr. Belloc would have done well to reflect before he concluded that almost all of our modern P.oglish writing is worthless, and it must surely be an eccentric taste which allows him to imply that in our time good verse has been published only "in The New Age or In the now defunct Westminster." For all this, we agree with him in rating Mr. Ernest Bramah high among imagina- tive writers ; and we have no doubt that his trumpet-blast will attract some sort of crowd. Where we have been so fully entertained, a circumspect review may seem churlish. We wish to record, therefore, first and finally, our gratitude to Mr. Bramah and our opinion that few books published during the past season will give such keen delight to so many classes of readers.
We are pet in China, a fantastic, conventional, bogus China, where people qre all mild-mannered, soft-spoken, ceremonious, ironic dnd heartless. Kai Lung, professional tale-teller, is walking from Loo-chow to Yu-ping in the exer- cise of his craft. In the heat of the day he is resting in a small wood. Ile is wakened from slumber by the laughter of Hwa-mei, a maiden of extreme beauty, whose " eyes strike fire from dami) clay, or make the touch of velvet harsh and stub- born, according to her several moods." By exchange of courtesies they reveal their immediate love ; Hwa-mei, hearing the noise of pursuing feet, is impelled to sudden flight. Her pursuer is Ming-shu, keeper of the spoken word to the Mandarin of Yu-ping. Finding his pursuit of no avail, he arrests Ka.i Lung in chagrin on the charge of travelling from a disaffected city. Kai Lung is haled off to prison, and brought for judgment daily before the Mandarin on some new and well-attested accusation of monstrous crime. Partly by the readiness of his wits and partly by the information that Hwa-mei is able to give him, he distracts the attention of the Mandarin each day by some apposite story and protracts the trial. At last, having detected both the Mandarin and Ming- shu in an unpardonable breach of custom, he discredits Ming-shu, gains his liberty, and carries off stores of wealth under the threat of revealing his secret.
This is the framework for a series of tales that would have kept any sensitive official from the performance of his duties. The plots are simple and almost legendary in effect ; it is mainly by the convention of their telling that they are so provocative of laughter. It is true that sometimes, towards the end of a tale, the convention protrudes and Mr. Bramah appears to tire a little of the effort to give life to his phrases. The balance of adjective and noun or of verb and adverb will • Kai INAIlf0 Hoiden Hours. By Ernest BrasnalL, London: Grant. atcliards, (7s. 6d.1 then sound mechanical ; and what would have been amusing, If more sparingly employed, fails to divert us. The recurrence of proverbs constructed to a new and attractive formula may rob later examples of their effect of ingenuity, and we can recognize the trick which gives their wit to such sentences as " Restrain the melodious flow of your undoubted eloquence," or " The classical perfection of our venerable tongue is strangely inadequate to express emotion." But, singly, his proverbs and ironic phrases are delightful, and in some of the tales, where Mr. Bramah has written with full vigour throughout, they are not so frequent or so apparent as to induce tedium or even the faint uneasiness of a remembered turn of speech. Mr. Bramah is least successful when, as in the talc of the Willow-pattern, he glances by parable at Western customs and comments on our present-day problems. It is not only that here he expresses his own prejudices and forces upon his tales a disputable moral ; beyond this, he betrays or misuses the pure art of story-telling by intruding irrelevant effects.
We could wish to quote pages to illustrate Mr. Bramah's virtues : we can give only one paragraph. Almost every paragraph would serve, but we confess to a preference for the more subtle and less hilarious humour. Wang Ho was a Chinese merchant of social ambitions, Cheng Lin a poor clerk.
" In spite of his preoccupation, Wang Ho never suffered his mind to wander when sums of money were concerned, and his inability to express himself by written signs only engendered in his alert brain an ever-present decision not to be entrapped by their use. Frequently Cheng Lin found mall sums of money lying in such a position as to induce the belief that they had been forgotten, but upon examining them closely he invariably found upon them marks by which they could be recognized if the necessity arose ; he therefore had no hesitation in returning them to Wang Ho with a seemly reference to the extreme improbability of the merchant actually leaving money thus unguarded, and to the lack of respect which it showed to Cheng Lin himself to expect that a person of his integrity should be tempted by so insignificant an amount. Wang Ho invariably admitted the justice of the reproach, but he did not on any future occasion materially increase the sum in question, so that it is to be doubted if ins heart was sincere."
It is pleasant in our days to meet with writing which shows little trace of fashions of the moment. The art of the short story has for a few years been a subject of debate : many critics have insisted that modern short stories have peculiar virtues, and certainly it is true that some writers have developed a new mode of short-story writing, with, to our minds, a greater effect of reality and an artifice less rigid, less fabricated, than was deemed proper in older stories. Mr. Bramah, by the nature of his book, stands apart from such developments, and, in observing his competence in a more traditional form, we may at first accord him more directly a place in the con- tinuity of literature, and thus be inclined to overrate him. It is unnecessary to attempt to decide where Mr. Bramah will stand in fifty years : it is sufficient to recognize that he has given us an enjoyable book.
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