(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
It is pleasant to find that even in these days the revival of interest in volumes of short stories still continues. But of course the stories must have a certain quality. I am glad to think that Traveller's Samples (Mills and Boon) will help forward the movement. Mrs. Henry Dudeney has a quite excellent touch for this sort of thing; her tales are both atmospheric and, for their length, astonishingly full of character. Also she has an engaging habit of avoiding the expected. Take one of the best in this present book, called "John," for instance. It is the slightest possible thing, just a picture of a schoolboy's hopeless love for a shallow cruel-brained girl eight years older than himself, who is in process of getting engaged to an eligible bachelor. But every figure in the little group lives. And the second part, which tells the return of the boy-lover twelve years later, shows you what I mean about Mrs. Dudeney's refreshing originality. I doubt if there are many writers who would have finished off the story in her very satisfactory way. There is one quality characteristic of most of the tales—a feeling for middle-age in men and women; many of them seem to be variations upon the same theme of a love that comes by waiting. Mrs. Dudeney can handle this situation with unfailing charm. Her confessed comedies are by far the weakest things in the book; there is one of them indeed that seemed to me amazingly pointless. But with this exception I can commend her volume whole-heartedly, and only hope that the author will continue to send out goods of such excellent workmanship, "as per" (whatever that means) these attractive samples.
Those who search for minor compensations have affected to find one in the idea that the actual happening of the World War has removed from us the old fictional scares, novels of German super-spies, and unsuspecting islanders taken unprepared. But to think this is to reckon without the ingenuity of such writers as Mr. Ridgwell Cullum. He, for example, has but to postulate that worst nightmare of all, an inconclusive peace, and we are back in the former terrors, blacker than ever. Suppose the Polish inventor of German undersea craft to have been so stricken with remorse at the frightful results thereof that he determines to hand all his secrets to the English Government, in the person of a young gentleman who combines the positions of Cabinet Minister, son and heir to a great shipbuilder, and hero of the story; suppose, moreover, that the said inventor was blessed with an only daughter, of radiant beauty and the rather conspicuous name of Vita Vladimir; suppose the inevitable romance, a secret submarine expedition to the island where Germany is maturing her felonious little plans, the destruction of the latest frightfulness, retaliation by Prussian myrmidons, abductions, murders, and I don't know what besides—and you will have some faint idea of the tumultuous episodes of The Men Who Wrought (Chapman and Hall). To say that the story moves is vastly to understate its headlong rapidity of action. And, while I hardly fancy that the characters themselves will carry overwhelming conviction, there remains, in the theory of the submersible liner and application to political facts, enough genuine wisdom to lift the tale out of the company of six-shilling shockers. To this extent at least The Men Who Wrought combines instruction with entertainment.
Inter-Arma (Heinemann) is the title that Mr. Edmund Gosse has given to his latest volume of essays, reprinted from The Edinburgh Review. No one who loves clarity of style will need assurance about the quality of these studies, which, with one exception, are concerned with some or other aspect of the world-struggle. In "War and Literature," a paper dated during the black days of October, 1914, the author attempts to realise what will be the probable literary effect of the catastrophe by recounting the various ways in which French writers suffered from that of 1870. An interesting prediction, too, as recalling what many of us believed at the beginning of the war, is this about the future of English letters: "What we must really face is the fact that this harvest of volumes [the autumn publishings of 1914] will mark the end of what is called 'current literature' for the remaining duration of the war. There can be no aftermath, we can aspire to no revival. The book which does not deal directly and crudely with the complexities of warfare and the various branches of strategy will, from Christmas onwards, not be published at all." As they stand, these words might well serve as a mild tonic for "current pessimism"; not even the paper famine has brought them to fulfilment. Elsewhere in the volume is an instructive paper on "The Neutrality of Sweden" (valuable but vexatious, as are all the indictments of our insular apathy in the matter of influencing foreign opinion), and two or three interesting studies of French life and letters under the conditions of war. In fine, a book full of scholarly grace, such as may well achieve the writer's hope, expressed in his preface, of renewing the friendship he has already made with those readers "whose minds have become attuned to his," though they are now "separated from him by leagues of sea and occupied in noble and unprecedented service."
The author of The Dop Doctor, with her expansive style, always seems cramped in any story of under a couple of hundred thousand words or so. Perhaps the best things in her new book of short stories, Earth to Earth (Heinemann), concern The Macwaugh, a shocking bad artist with an immense thirst and the heftiest of Scotch accents. I don't think that there ever was or could be anybody like Macwaugh, or indeed that people talk or act like the majority of the characters in this book; but that's where, perhaps, "Richard Dehan" scores a point or two off those realists who mistake accuracy of detail for art. This amiable drunkard, though absurd, lives and moves. The author is evidently attached to him, and that helps. She has, indeed, something of the Dickensian exuberance which carries off absurdities and crudities that would otherwise be intolerably tiresome. She even seems to get some fun out of this kind of thing:—"'Write,' commanded the Zanouka with a double-barrelled flash of her great eyes;" or, again, "It's all poppycock and bumblepuppy," meaning, just, it isn't true.
If you are writing or intending to write a book about boys let me beg you not to follow the prevailing fashion and call your hero David. Within the last few weeks I have read David Penstephen, David Blaise, and now it is Miss Eleanor Porter's Just David (Constable) and I am beginning to want a rest from the name. David III., if he may be called so, has saved me from utter confusion of mind by being an American product and having a charm that is peculiarly his own. Cynics indeed may find his perfection a little cloying, and may say with some justification that no human child ever radiated so much joy and happiness. All the same, this simple tale of childhood will appeal irresistibly to those who do not draw too fine a distinction between sentiment and sentimentality. On the whole Miss Porter, although hovering near the border, does not pass into the swamps of sloppiness, and as an antidote to War fiction I can recommend Just David without any further qualification.
Richard Harding Davis will, alas, entertain us no more with his easy-flowing pen. These short stories, Somewhere in France (Duckworth), must be his farewell to us. And it is good to feel that his sympathies are so whole-heartedly on the right side. The first of the stories (the only one that has anything to do with the War) is a spirited yarn of the turning of the tables on a German secret service agent, with plenty of atmosphere and hurrying action. The rest are light studies of American life, of which I chiefly commend an extravaganza set in Hayti with a resourceful Yankee electrician, as hero, in conflict with the President in the matter of overdue wages; and the final item of a tussle between a stern and upright District Attorney and the might of Tammany, in which the author seems to have a rather whimsical mistrust of both sides. I always like to think of Tammany when our croakers are holding up everything in this poor little island to obloquy.