NOVELS.
ODD CRAFT.* WHILE the majority of his contemporaries, either out of defer- ence to a perverse fashion or through indulgence in a natural bent, consecrate their talents to the depression of the reading public, the admirable and incorrigible Mr. Jacobs serenely continues to distribute wholesome food for laughter. This resolve of his is all the more laudable because he happens to be well able to compete on equal terms with those who aim at lowering the animal spirits of their readers. Two or three times, just to show us what he can do if he chooses, Mr. Jacobs has made brief excursions into the realm of the gruesome, with results sufficiently horrifying to gratify the most exacting amateur of the uncomfortable. We accept these proofs of his versatility with an admiration all the more sincere because of their rarity. Once in a blue moon Mr. Jacobs may be permitted to make our flesh creep, but his true function is that of the dispeller of damps. There are so few of the tribe that they can ill be spared from their beneficent labours to swell the big battalions enlisted under the banner of the Giant Despair. It is therefore with a feeling of relief that we find Mr. Jacobs in his new venture uninterruptedly engaged in the diffusion of gaiety.
To analyse the secret of Mr. Jacobs's success as a humourist is no easy task. It cannot be readily illustrated by quotation, since he seldom indulges in verbal pleasantries or epigrams, the appeal to, the sense of the ludicrous being made rather through the situation than by any special coruscation of fun. The range of his characters, again, and the choice of surround- ings are severely limited, considerations which greatly enhance the danger of repetition, and frequent reliance is placed on practical joking, which is apt in unskilful hands to become fatiguing. Again, the elimination of all coarseness from the conversation and behaviour of sailors, firemen, night-watch- men, and the like might be supposed to lend the whole some- thing more than a flavour of unreality. Yet though it would, we fear, be vain to seek in real life for the exact counterparts of Mr. Jacobs's dramatis personae, there is so much elemental humanity in them that we are never disconcerted by this discrepancy. No doubt the uncompromising disciples of the "slum school" would look askance at Mr. Jacobs's cheerful sketches, but he would at least be able to retort that though he has never claimed to paint low life exactly as it is lived, he has, on the other hand, equally abstained from any effort to glorify or idealise it out of all recognition. "Ginger" Dick and his associates are far from being saints ; they are lament- ably to seek in their ability to discriminate between meum and tuum, they are afflicted with an unquenchable thirst, and habitually over-prone to resort to the argument of the clenched fist. But they are none the less genial ruffians, who are on occasion not inaccessible to the appeal of senti- ment. Even if it can be urged that they have no living counter- parts, that Cho world in which they move is an agreeable figment of Mr. Jacobs's imagination, and that his stories must be relegated to the category of fairy-tales, these considera- tions have proved powerless to affect their popularity, and are not likely to impair the enjoyment of any one who can • Odd OWL By W. W. Jacobs. London : George Newnes. appreciate honest and hearty fun. In the present collection we meet with several old acquaintances, but further familiarity with the recitals of the night-watchman, the lustige Streiche of Bob Pretty, and the humours and misfortunes of I" Ginger " Dick and his comrades, so far from engendering satiety, only elicit fresh admiration for the inexhaustible invention of their creator.
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