The Modern Chesterfield (Hurst and Blackett) is a book that I enjoyed only after overcoming a considerable and partially-justified prejudice. In the first place, I generally dislike stories told in epistolary form; in the second, I almost always detest books that their publishers advertise by selected "smart sayings." But I must honestly admit that The Modern Chesterfield conquered me—chiefly, I think, by its good-nature. The writer of these very up-to-date paternal admonitions is supposed to be one Sir Benjamin Budgen, Bart, "of Budgen House, Fleet Street, E.C. and Cedar Court, Twickenham, Middlesex." The addresses tell you what to expect—a satire on the methods of popular journalism. This in fact is what you get, but the satire is so neat (and withal so genial) and Mr. Max Rittenberg has so happy a knack of conveying character in a few lines that you are simply bound to enjoy reading him. One other facility he has that deserves the highest praise: he tells his story, in letters that emanate from one side only, without wearisome repetition. There is, I mean, hardly any of that "You say in your last that—and ask me whether—etc.," which in similar volumes always bores me to ill-temper by its unlikeness to the letter-writing customs of real life. An explanatory line or two at the head of each epistle puts you in possession of the facts—that Norman, the son to whom they are written, has left Cambridge, is proving unsatisfactory, has married an Earl's daughter, and so on. That known, the letters tell their own tale. They reveal the writer too (I refer to Sir Benjamin): shrewd, clear-headed, vulgar and of bull-dog courage. The disasters that overwhelm him in the end do not leave his readers unmoved; bankrupt and beaten he goes down fighting with the final characteristic wire, in response to a suggestion of compromise by his chief enemy, "Surrender be damned." A little book to enjoy.
The village priest of Clogher, as depicted in two colours on the paper wrapper of Father O'Flynn (Hutchinson), is a man of plethoric habit and sanguine countenance engaged in brandishing a large horsewhip. The book is dedicated by Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole, to Sir E. Carson and Mr. Redmond, and in a short preface he says: "The Irish Roman Catholic priest is the main factor in present-day Irish affairs. I have attempted to catch him at his best in the butterfly net of this trivial story...." I am anxious not to do Mr. Stacpoole an injustice, but I do feel that (as an entomologist) he gets easily tired. In the 250 pages of Father O'Flynn there is a good deal of very tolerable Irish "atmosphere"; a very tepid love affair between Miss Eileen Pope and a gentleman from England "over for the hunting;" a lot about old Mr. Pope—a moody maniac who owned an illicit still at Clon Beg House, incurred the enmity of the United Patriots, was in the habit of keeping followers away from his beautiful step-daughter with a duck-gun, and finally (after locking up his brother who came to recover a debt) set fire to his own mansion—but practically nothing at all about the reverend gentleman outside. Beyond a few conversations with the "boys" and some rescue work at the end, Father O'Flynn scarcely comes into the plot. There is humour in the book and some good description in patches, but towards understanding the Irish priest it will probably assist Sir Edward Carson and Mr. John Redmond very little more than it will assist a settlement of the problems of Ulster. However, it may give them an agreeable hour or so in a railway train, and the announcement (also made on the cover) that it is "an entirely new novel, now published for the first time," may call their attention to the value, in art as well as politics, of emphatic tautology.
I could wish that The Escape of Mr. Trimm, His Plight and Other Plights (Hodder and Stoughton) had been one continuous whole, instead of a number of separate items, for though Mr. Irvin S. Cobb tells a tale well he has not such a genius for the short story that he needs must express himself through that medium. Moreover, the people of his imagination are too interesting to be readily parted with; I should, for instance, have liked to see how that gentleman convict, Mr. Trimm, fared when, after his odd vicissitudes, he was restored to the clutches of the Law and was set on to do his time with the worst of them. There was plenty of criminal company available, for Mr. Cobb makes some speciality of perpetrators of dark deeds, and I feel that all the characters and events of the subsequent stories could, with a little ingenuity, have been worked into the one plot with our fraudulent financier as the centrepiece. That wrong-headed but chivalrous relic of the Southern Confederacy, Major Putnam Stone, would fit in as the virtuous or comic relief, his inborn lust for battle and his chance employment as a newspaper reporter being just the things to combat these felonious activities. There is certainly a lack of lovable women in the book, yet I have always been led to suppose that the U.S.A., the locus in quo, overflows with feminine charm, and our author is obviously man enough to appreciate and reproduce it for us. However, even a critic must take things as they are, and it is a collection of short stories that I have to complain about. My complaint, then, reduces itself to this, that in the case of each of them I regret their shortness.
Jovial Person (to sweep). "Hullo, Chawlie me boy. Glad ter see yer lookin' so well."
Mr. Lloyd George (to shade of Pitt). "Peace hath her income-tax no less renowned than War."