Selected English Short Stories (XIX and XX Centuries), edited by H.S.M. (Oxford University Press). This volume has the merit of containing in very short compass twenty-eight stories by English and American authors, not too conventionally selected, which would form admirable texts for a short story course. It includes stories by Mark Rutherford and Richard Garnett which are likely to be unfamiliar to most readers, and if taken in conjunction with the previous volume in the same series, provides a tolerably complete conspectus of the development of the short story in England and America since 1800.
Original Sinners, by Henry W. Nevinson (B.W. Huebsch, Inc.). It has always been a mystery to me why Mr. Nevinson's short stories are so little known to American readers. His earlier volumes "The Plea of Pan" and "Between the Acts," are eagerly sought by collectors, but they have been permitted to go out of print, I believe, and the general public knows very little about them. To nine out of ten people, Mr. Nevinson is known as a publicist and war correspondent, but it is by his short stories that he will live longest, and the present volume is one more illustration of the place which has always been occupied in English literature by the gifted amateur. The stories in the present volume all lead back by implication to the golden age, and if Mr. Nevinson's mood is elegiac, he never refuses to face reality.
Irish Fairy Tales, by James Stephens (The Macmillan Company). We think of Mr. Stephens primarily as a poet and an ironic moralist, but in the present volume a new side of his genius is revealed. It might seem that too many writers have attempted with more or less success to reproduce the spirit of the gray Irish Sagas by retelling them, and we think of Standish O'Grady, Lady Gregory, "A.E.," and others. But Mr. Stephens has seen them in the fresh light of an unconquerable youth, and I am more than half inclined to think that this is the best book he has given us.
Savitri, and Other Women, by Marjorie Strachey (G.P. Putnam's Sons). Marjorie Strachey has presented the feminist point of view in eleven short stories drawn from the folklore of many nations. Her object in telling these stories is a sophisticated one, and I suspect that her success has been only partial, but she has considerable resources of style to assist her, and I think that the volume is worthy of some attention.
The Thirteen Travellers, by Hugh Walpole (George H. Doran Company). Mr. Walpole has collected in this volume twelve studies of English life in the present transition stage between war and peace. He has studied with considerable care those modifications of the English character which are noticeable to the patient observer, and his volume has some value as an historical document apart from its undoubted literary charm. While it will not rank among the best of Mr. Walpole's books, it is full of excellent genre pieces rendered with subtlety and poise.
III. Translations
The Horse-stealers and Other Stories, and The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (The Macmillan Company). Mrs. Garnett's excellent edition of Chekhov is rapidly drawing to a conclusion. In the two volumes now under consideration we find the greater part of Chekhov's very short sketches, notably many of the humorous pieces which he wrote in early life. These are most often brief renderings of a mood, or quiet ironic contrasts which set forth facts without drawing any moral or pointing to any intellectual conclusion.
Little Pierre, and The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, by Anatole France; edited by Frederic Chapman, James Lewis May, and Bernard Miall. (John Lane). The first of these volumes presents another instalment of the author's autobiography in the form of a series of delicately rendered pictures portrayed with quiet deftness and a laughing irony which is half sad. In "The Seven Wives of Bluebeard" he has retold four legends and endowed them with a philosophic content of smiling ironic doubt which accepts life as we find it and preaches a gentle disillusioned epicureanism. Both volumes are faultlessly translated.
People, by Pierre Hamp; translated by James Whitall (Harcourt, Brace, and Company). Among the poets and prose writers who have emerged in France during the past ten years and formulated a new social and artistic philosophy, Pierre Hamp is by no means the least important figure. He has already published about a dozen volumes of mingled fiction and economic comment which form a somewhat detailed history of the French workingman in his social and industrial relations, but "People" is the first volume which has yet been translated into English. His attitude as revealed in these stories is full of indignant pity, and he gives us a series of sharply etched portraits, many of which will not be forgotten readily. He does not conceal his propagandist tendencies, but they limit him as an artist less in these stories than in his other books. Mr. Whitall's translation is excellent, and conveys the author's rugged style convincingly.
Little Russian Masterpieces in Four Volumes, chosen and translated from the Russian by Zénaïde A. Ragozin (G.P. Putnam's Sons). This collection is valuable as a supplement to existing anthologies because it wisely leaves for other editors the most familiar stories and concentrates on introducing less known writers to the English-speaking public. The editor has broadened her scheme in order to include Polish authors. Among the less familiar figures who are here introduced, I may mention Lesskof, Mamin-Sibiriàk, and Slutchefsky. I can cordially recommend this admirable series.