The Golden Bird and Other Sketches, by Dorothy Eastern, with a foreword by John Galsworthy (Alfred A. Knopf). These forty short sketches of Sussex and of France are rendered deftly with a faithful objectivity of manner which has not barred out the essential poetry of their substance. These pictures are lightly touched with a quiet brooding significance, as if they had been seen at twilight moments in a dream world in which human relationships had been partly forgotten. They are frankly impressionistic, except for the group of French stories, in which Miss Easton has sought more definitely to interpret character. The danger of this form is a certain preciosity which the author has skilfully evaded, and the influence of Mr. Galsworthy is nowhere too clearly apparent. I recommend the volume as one of the best English books which has come to us during the past year.
My Neighbors: Stories of the Welsh People, by Caradoc Evans (Harcourt, Brace and Howe). In his third collection of stories, Mr. Evans has for the most part forsaken his study of the Cardigan Bay peasant for the London Welsh, and although his style preserves the same stark biblical notation as before, it seems less suited to record the ironies of an industrial civilization. Allowing for this, and for Mr. Evans' bent towards an unduly acid estimate of human nature, it must be confessed that these stories have a certain permanent literary quality, most successful in "Earthbred," "Joseph's House," and "A Widow Woman." These three collections make it tolerably clear that Mr. Evans will find his true medium in the novel, where an epic breadth of material is at hand to fit his epic breadth of speech.
Tatterdemalion, by John Galsworthy (Charles Scribner's Sons). This volume contains the ripest product of Mr. Galsworthy's short story art during the past seven years. Its range is very wide, and in these twenty-three stories, we have the best of the mystical war legends from "The Grey Angel" to "Cafard," the gentle irony of "The Recruit" and "Defeat," and the gracious vision of "Spindleberries," "The Nightmare Child," and "Buttercup-Night." Nowhere in the volume do we find the slight touch of sentimentality which has marred the strength of Mr. Galsworthy's later novels, but everywhere very quietly realised pictures of a golden age which is still possible to his imagination, despite the harsh conflict with material realities which his art has often encountered. Perhaps the best story in the present collection is "Cafard," where Mr. Galsworthy has almost miraculously succeeded in extracting the last emotional content out of a situation in which a single false touch of sentiment would have wrecked his story.
Limbo, by Aldous Huxley (George H. Doran Company). This collection of six fantasies in prose and one play has no special principle of unity except its attempt to apply the art of Laforgue to much less adequate material. Setting aside "Happy Families" as entirely negligible, and "Happily Ever After" and "Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers" as qualified successes, the other four stories do achieve more or less what they set out to do, although Mr. Huxley only achieves a personal synthesis of style and substance in "The Death of Lully." The other three stories are full of promise as yet unrealised because of Mr. Huxley's inability or unwillingness to conceal the technique of his art.
Deep Waters, by W. W. Jacobs (Charles Scribner's Sons). Mr. Jacobs' formula is not yet outworn, but it is becoming perilously uncertain. His talent has always been a narrow one, but in his early volumes his realization of character was quite vivid, and his plot technique superb. At least two of these stories are entirely mechanical, and the majority do not rise above mediocrity. "Paying Off," "Sam's Ghost," and "Dirty Work" faintly recall Mr. Jacobs' early manner.
Lo, and Behold Ye!, by Seumas MacManus (Frederick A. Stokes Company). Many of these chimney-corner stories are older than Homer, but Mr. MacManus has retold them in the language of the roads, and this pageant of tinkers and kings, fairies and scholars, lords and fishermen march by to the sound of the pipes and the ribald comments of little boys along the road. The quality of this volume is as fresh as that of those first Donegal fairy stories which Mr. McClure discovered twenty-five years ago. I think that the best of these stories are "The Mad Man, The Dead Man, and the Devil," "Dark Patrick's Blood-horse," and "Donal O'Donnell's Standing Army," but this is only a personal selection.
The Clintons, and Others, by Archibald Marshall (Dodd, Mead and Company). I believe that this is Mr. Marshall's first volume of short stories, and they have a certain interest as a quiet chronicle of an old social order which has gone never to return. The comparison of Mr. Marshall's work with that of Anthony Trollope is as inevitable as it is to the former's disadvantage. This volume shows honest, sincere craftsmanship, and never rises nor falls below an average level of mediocrity.
The Man Who Understood Women, and While Paris Laughed, by Leonard Merrick (E. P. Dutton and Company). These two volumes of the collected edition of Mr. Merrick's novels and stories are of somewhat uneven value. The best of them have a finish which is unsurpassed in its kind by any of his English contemporaries, but there are many stories in the first of these two volumes which are somewhat ephemeral. Mr. Locke in his introduction to "The Man Who Understood Women" rather overstates Mr. Merrick's case, but at his best these stories form an interesting English parallel to the work of O. Henry. The second volume suffers the fate of all sequels in endeavouring to revive after a lapse of years the pranks and passions of the poet Tricotrin. The first five stories in the volume, while they do not attain the excellence of "The Tragedy of a Comic Song," are worthy stories in the same kind. The other seven stories are frankly mawkish in content, although redeemed by Mr. Merrick's excellent technique.
Workhouse Characters, by Margaret Wynne Nevinson (The Macmillan Company). This collection of newspaper sketches written during the past fifteen years have no pretensions to art, and were written with a frankly propagandist intention. The vividness of their portraiture and the passion of their challenge to the existing social order warrant their mention here, and I do not think they will be forgotten readily by those who read them. This volume has attracted little comment in the American press, and it would be a pity if it is permitted to go out of print over here.
The New Decameron: Volume the First (Robert M. McBride & Co.). There is more to be said for the idea which prompted these stories than for the success with which the idea has been carried out. A group of tourists seeking adventures on the Continent agree to beguile the tedium of the journey by telling each other tales. Unfortunately the Nightingale does not sing on, and the young Englishmen and women who have collaborated in this volume have gone about their task in a frankly amateurish spirit. The stories by W. F. Harvey and Sherard Vines attain a measured success, and some mention may be made of M. Storm-Jameson's story, "Mother-love." It is to be hoped that in future volumes of the series, the editor will choose his contributors more carefully, and frankly abandon the Decameron structure, which has been artificially imposed after the stories were written.