The Grim 13, edited by Frederick Stuart Greene (Dodd, Mead & Co.), is a collection of thirteen stories of literary value which have been declined with enthusiastic praise by the editors of American magazines because of their grim quality, or because they have an extremely unhappy ending. The collection was gathered as a test of the public interest, in order to remove if possible what the editor believed to be a false editorial policy. It is interesting to examine these stories, and to pretend that one is an editor. The experiment has been extremely successful and has produced at least one story by an American author ("The Abigail Sheriff Memorial" by Vincent O'Sullivan) and one story by an English author ("Old Fags" by Stacy Aumonier), which are permanent in their literary value.
Four Days: the Story of a War Marriage, by Hetty Hemenway (Little, Brown & Co.). Of this story I have spoken elsewhere in this volume, I shall only add here that it is one of the most significant spiritual studies in fiction that the war has produced, and that it is directly told in a style of sensitive beauty.
A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling (Doubleday, Page & Co.) is the first collection of Mr. Kipling's short stories published in several years. I must confess frankly that there is but one story in the volume which seems to me a completely realized rendering of the substance which Mr. Kipling has chosen, and that is the incomparable satire on publicity entitled "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat." In this volume you will find many stories in many moods, and some of them are postscripts to earlier volumes of Mr. Kipling. I cannot believe that his war stories deserve as high praise as they have been accorded. This volume presents Mr. Kipling as the most consummate living master of technique in the English tongue, but his inspiration has failed him except for the single exception which I have chronicled. The volume is a memory rather than an actuality, and it has the pathos of a forgotten dream.
The Bracelet of Garnets and Other Stories by Alexander Kuprin, translated by Leo Pasvolsky, with an Introduction by William Lyon Phelps (Charles Scribner's Sons). This collection of stories is based on the author's own selection for this purpose, and although the translation is not thoroughly idiomatic, the sheer poetry of Kuprin's imagination shines through the veil of an alien speech and captures the imagination of the reader. Kuprin's pictorial sense is curiously similar to that of Wilbur Daniel Steele, and it is interesting to study the reactions of similar temperaments on widely different substances and backgrounds. Kuprin achieves a chiselled finality of utterance which is as evident in his tragedy as in his comedy, and in some of these pieces a fine allegorical beauty shines prismatically through a carefully economized brilliance of narrative.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories by D. H. Lawrence (B. W. Huebsch). The twelve short stories collected in this volume are full of the same warm color that one always associates with Mr. Lawrence's best work, and the nervous complaining beauty of his style makes him the English compeer of Gabriele d'Annunzio. The warm lush fragrance of many European countrysides pervades these stories and a certain poignant sensual disillusionment is insistently stressed by the characters who flit through the shadowy foreground. It is the definitely realized and concrete sense of landscape that Mr. Lawrence has achieved which is his finest artistic attribute, and the sensitive response to light which is so characteristic an element in his vision bathes all the pictures he presents in a rich glow, whose gradations of light and shadow respond finely to the emotional reactions of his characters. He is the most sophisticated of the contemporary English realists, and has the sense of poetry to a high degree which is conspicuously absent in the work of other English novelists.
A Designer of Dawns and Other Tales by Gertrude Russell Lewis (Pilgrim Press). I set this volume of allegories beside "Flame and the Shadow-Eater" by Henrietta Weaver as one of the two best books of allegories published in 1917. These seven little tales have a quiet imaginative glow that is very appealing and I find in them a folk quality that is almost Scandinavian in its naïvete.
The Terror: A Mystery, by Arthur Machen (Robert M. McBride & Co.). When this story was first published in the Century Magazine in 1917, under the title of "The Coming of the Terror," it was at once hailed by discriminating readers as the best short story by an English writer published in an American magazine since "The Friends" by Stacy Aumonier. It is now published in its complete form as originally written, and although it is as long as a short novel, it has an essential unity of incident which justifies us in claiming it as a short story. I suppose that Algernon Blackwood is the only other English writer who has the same gift for making strange spiritual adventures completely real to the imagination, and the author of "The Bowmen" has surpassed even that fine story in this description of how a mysterious terror overran England during the last years of the great war and how the mystery of its passing was finally revealed. The emotional tension of the reader is enhanced by the quiet matter-of-fact air with which the story is presented. The volume is one of the best five or six books of short stories which England has produced during the past year.
The Second Odd Number: Thirteen Tales, by Guy de Maupassant, the translation by Charles Henry White, an Introduction by William Dean Howells (Harper & Brothers). It is reported in some volume of French literary memoirs that Guy de Maupassant regarded the first series of "The Odd Number" as better than the original. Be this as it may, the thirteen stories which make up this volume are admirably rendered with a careful reflection of the slightest nuances. As Mr. Howells states in his introduction to the volume: "The range of these stories is not very great; the effect they make is greater than the range." But this selection has been admirably chosen with a view to making the range as wide as possible, and I can only hope that it will serve to influence some of our younger writers toward a greater descriptive and emotional economy.
The Girl and the Faun by Eden Phillpotts (J. B. Lippincott Co.). These eight idylls of the four seasons are graceful Greek legends told with a modern touch in poetic prose. They have a quality of quiet beauty which will commend them to many readers to whom the more realistic work of Mr. Phillpotts does not appeal, and the admirable illustrations by Frank Brangwyn are a felicitous accompaniment to the modulated prose of Mr. Phillpotts.
Barbed Wire and Other Poems by Edwin Ford Piper (The Midland Press, Moorhead, Minn.). As Grant Showerman's "A Country Chronicle" is an admirable rendering of the farm life of Wisconsin in the seventies, so these poems are a fine imaginative record of the pioneer life of Nebraska a little later. I believe this volume to contain quite as fine poetry as Robert Frost's "North of Boston." Here you will meet many men and women struggling against the loneliness of prairie life, and winning spiritual as well as material conquests out of nature. The greater part of this volume is composed of a series of narrative poems entitled "The Neighborhood." Their lack of literary sophistication is part of their charm, and the calculated ruggedness of the author's style is a faithful reflection of his barren physical background.