I hope that Mr. Vaughan Kester, author of John o' Jamestown (Hodder and Stoughton), is innocent of intent to do the dreadful thing that he has done. With the book itself I have no fault to find; it is quite a good historical novel, and tells with a fair amount of excitement the story of Captain John Smith and the early settlers in Virginia, not omitting Pocahontas. Mr. Kester's crime consists not in his novel, but in the fact that he has probably plunged America into all the horrors of a new outbreak of historical fiction. A few years ago every adult in the United States was writing historical novels. Those were the black days at the beginning of this century, still spoken of with a shudder from Maine to Tennessee. Gradually the horror spent itself; the country became pacified. Except for an occasional sporadic outbreak, the plague was stamped out. It got about that the historical novel was "a dead one," and young America turned to something else. Now you begin to see what Mr. Kester has done. While Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton are publishing John o' Jamestown over in England, another firm is flooding the States with it. Mr. Kester is a confirmed "best-seller" on the other side of the Atlantic. Probably his American publishers have issued a first edition of a hundred thousand of this story. The result may be imagined. Wild-eyed literary agents will carry the fiery cross throughout the country, crying that the historical novel is not dead after all, that there is still money in it; and thousands of estimable young men who might have been turning out quite decent stories of American life will thrust paper into their typewriters and begin, "Of the days when I followed my dear lord through many a hard-fought fray it ill becomes me, plain rude man that I am, to speak...." And it will be Mr. Kester's fault. It would not matter so much if the great army of American writers could do the thing even half as well as he has done it in John o' Jamestown; but they cannot. I know them, and that is why a great trembling runs through me so that I can scarce hold my pen to complete this review.
The name of Mr. Gordon Gardiner is unfamiliar to me; but I have little doubt that if The Reconnaissance (Chapman and Hall) is a first novel its author will improve upon work that struck me as at present somewhat ingenuously conventional. There are two parts to the tale; the first shows how Leslie earned popular applause and the V.C. by remaining with a wounded comrade whom he was actually too frightened to leave. That was a good beginning, and I said to myself that Mr. Gardiner was of the right stuff; he had a vigorous, incisive style that suited well the matter of pain and anguish that he had in hand. But, alas! in its hours of case the story became much more uncertain. All the characters, including the involuntary hero and the man he rescued (now a lord), turn up at an hotel on the Lake of Como. There is some mild word-painting that may remind you pleasantly of pleasant places; and a disproportionate pother because in one of the sudden lake storms Leslie dashes for shelter into what he supposes to be his own bedroom (actually the heroine's) and is imprisoned there by the sticking of a shutter. An awkward incident, of course, especially as it occurred in the dead of night, but scarcely enough to make half a novel out of. Naturally, in the end Leslie owns up about the heroism, and goes away to justify his unearned credit upon the stricken field; but I am afraid I must confess that the prospect of his return left me indifferent. I understand that The Reconnaissance originally appeared in The Daily Telegraph; this being so, the persistence with which its characters quote extracts from The Times savours almost of filial ingratitude. Seriously, the first part of the novel was a promise which the second left unfulfilled. Mr. Gardiner is still in my debt.
TO THE CABINET.
(Suggested by a recent doctoring of "Hansard.")
The judgment of the People's "Yea" or "Nay"
Wherefore should virtuous men like you shun?
You are—or so you confidently say—
Prepared for dissolution.
Then snatch a hint from Haldane's little fake,
Who glanced with eye alert and beady at
His speech in proof, and, for appearance' sake,
Added the word "immediate."