Perhaps, since he is to be a book reviewer, H. should go to a Montessori school. They teach the children to skip.
Gerald Cumberland's Set Down in Malice reveals the interesting fact that Mrs. Shaw calls him "George." Moreover, she is quoted as saying "Don't be absurd, George."
There are limits to the success of the most adroit literary advertiser the modern world has known, as we learned from a trip to the British front two years ago. Our conducting officer had been Shaw's guide a few months before, and we were anxious to learn how he had impressed the army.
"Oh, he was no end of nuisance," replied the young officer. "When I got him out to our mess I found out that he was a vegetarian, and I had to hop around and get him eggs and all sorts of truck."
If Gerald Cumberland is thirty-one or less, Tales of a Cruel Country is an exceedingly promising collection of short stories. If, on the other hand, he has gone beyond that age we see only a doddering literary future for him. There are twenty-two stories in Tales of a Cruel Country and three of them are excellent. One, in fact, seems to us a superb short story, but many of the other nineteen are rot. Now, they are the sort of rot which a young man may turn out by the bushel and still go on to great things. "Her eyes are pits of darkness," "a beautiful animal," "whiter than the paper on which this little history is written," "he pulled his body together sensually," "his teeth bit more deeply into his lower lip," "brutally I tore her arms away and flung her from me as a man would fling away a snake that had coiled around him in his sleep"—that is the sort of rot we mean.
It has its place in the work of every young writer. In fact, if he writes honestly there is no skipping this period, which must be passed before he is ready to do more important work. Fortunately, there are several easy tests by which one may determine whether a writer is still in his salad days, in which he does as the romaines, or whether he is ready to go on and deal with hardier grasses. Ask him what the word "mirror" suggests to him and note whether he replies "a man shaving" or "a slender woman disrobing." Try him with "model" and see whether he replies "artist's" or "tenement," and finally, if he can meet your "bed" immediately with "eight hours' sleep" you may put him down as among those who have finished their literary stint of "half insane gleam of desire," "her eyes swooped into his," and "vermouth on purple trays."
We are particularly interested in the publication of Clarence Buddington Kelland's The Little Moment of Happiness, because we made a dramatization of the novel last year which failed of production partly because of the deplorable lapse in morals which Mr. Kelland allows to his hero. The story concerns a Puritanical young American officer who is stationed in Paris during the war and falls in love with a beautiful French girl named Andrée. Now, Andrée is not like the girls whom Kendall, our hero, has been accustomed to meet in America. "A young man love a young girl," says Andrée, "and a young girl love a young man.... They marry, maybe. That is well. But maybe they do not marry. It is expensive to marry. Then they see each other very often, and he gives her money so she can live.... That is well, because they are fidèle."