(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
"A tough hide and some facility of expression"—to quote the author's modest estimate of his qualifications—have enabled Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg to make his Indiscretions of the Naval Censor (Cassell) the liveliest book of the War that has come my way. Thanks to the first element in his make-up he managed to retain his difficult and delicate post throughout the War, and only once came into serious collision with any of his official superiors. As these included First Lords of such diverse temperament as Mr. Churchill and Lord Fisher, and First Sea Lords with such diametrically opposite views regarding publicity as Lord Fisher and Sir Henry Jackson, this was no small achievement. Thanks to the second element he has written a book which scarcely contains a dull page. Whether he is giving us a pen-picture of Mr. Churchill conducting Admiralty business from a sick-bed, with his head swathed in flannel and an immense cigar protruding from the bandage; or explaining how the legend of Lord Kitchener's survival arose from a trivial error that caused the news of the Hampshire disaster to reach Berlin a few minutes before it was published in London, he always writes with directness and verve. Admiral Brownrigg tells a good deal about the censorship, and illustrates his theme with some excellent reproductions of naval photographs before and after the Censor had "re-touched" them. He tells us even more about his work in a less familiar rôle, that of Publicity Agent to the Silent Service. It was he who arranged visits to the Fleet by more or less distinguished personages—"Brownrigg's circus parties," as they were dubbed in the gun-room—and who engaged authors like Mr. Kipling and artists like Sir John Lavery to describe and portray the doings of the Fleet and its auxiliaries. It pains me to learn, however, that "Passed by Censor" was only a guarantee for the harmlessness and not for the veracity of the stories narrated; and in particular that the famous "Q"-boat ruse of the demented female with the explosive baby was a pure work of imagination.
Without any special heralding, Mr. Eric Leadbitter seems to have stepped into the front rank, perhaps even to the leadership, of those active novelists whose theme is English rural life. I emphasize the word "active," with of course a thought for the master of them all, the wizard of Dorchester, at whose feet it would probably be fair to suppose Mr. Leadbitter to have learnt some at least of his craft. His new story, Shepherd's Warning (Allen and Unwin), is a quiet tale of life in a not specially attractive village—a tale that conquers by its direct humanity and by an art so delicate and so deftly concealed that the book has a deceptive appearance of having written itself without effort on the part of its author. It concerns a group of peasants, agricultural labourers, inhabitants of Fidding, a village gradually yielding to the encroachments by tram and villa of the neighbouring town. The simple annals of these folk, and especially of one family, old Bob Garrett and his grandsons, provide the matter of a tale gentle as the passage of time itself, never dull, instinct with quality in every line of it. Mr. Leadbitter has a method of concentration so pronounced that, once let his characters, even his heroine, step outside the beam that he has focussed upon Fidding, and they vanish utterly, till the working (apparently) of fate brings them back again. Even the murder in his early chapters is so lightly touched upon as to produce hardly any effect of violence. His sympathy with the life of the soil, and the human lives that are so near to it, is clearly absorbing; the result is that, to all save the confirmed sensationalist (piqued possibly by the waste of good homicide), Shepherd's Warning will also, I think, prove Reader's Delight.
Mr. H. Collinson Owen, formerly Editor of the soldiers' paper, The Balkan News, would just love to trap you into an argument on the value of our Macedonian campaign as compared with certain other war efforts. His book, Salonika and After (Hodder and Stoughton), shows him thirsting to accept battle for the cause he champions; and in the sub-title, The Side-Show that Ended the War, he fairly throws down the gauntlet. But take my advice and don't be drawn. He has a foreword from General Milne to support him, and an extract from Ludendorff's Memoirs, and a quotation from The Times. He has a very lively and convincing way of putting things too, and once he gets his enthusiasm fairly in hand becomes an uncommonly powerful advocate. Not that this volume is by any means just a piece of special pleading; only the author is honourably concerned to show both the importance and the severity of the war against the Bulgars, which he thinks people at home were a little inclined to disparage. I certainly cannot remember doing so, but, putting controversy aside, this book remains an adequate first-hand account of an adventure so great as to demand an heroic literature all its own, where it can be seen in true perspective. Mr. Owen deals delightfully with nights in Salonika clubland or the vagaries of King "Tino", or with the more warlike matters culminating in the terrific actions that held the enemy's left wing tight while our allies smashed his centre. An excellent book, with illustrations above the average and a good map handily placed.
Mrs. Henry Dudeney's Spade Work (Hurst and Blackett) is a queer story queerly told. A musician and an art-and-crafty girl, both poor and both dull, are engaged. The musician, visiting his fiancée, now well off and installed in a comfortable village farm-house, lets the strong air of the place get into his head and falls deep in love with a yeoman's daughter, who in turn, stimulated by this experience, straightway succumbs (at her first dance in real society, into which the great lady of the village, her patron, has introduced her) to the suggestion that she shall spend an unchaperoned night on a young blood's yacht, with results usual in distressful fiction. However, after many tribulations she and her musician, now duller than ever, are united, while the jilted craftswoman is left "full of ideas, sumptious (sic), a little feverish" for village industries which from my impression of her mentality I should judge would be of a devastating order. Lovers of that charming little West-country village in which the author sets her scene will not easily forgive her for naming it and baldly cataloguing its houses and sundry points of its environment, leaving out most that is the essential of its charm. It's simply not done by authentic writers of fiction—barring house-agents.
Those who experienced the rapture of discovery in an exhibition last May of caricatures by Edmund X. Kapp may now rejoice (supposing them to command the needful guinea) that they can recapture this pleasure through a volume of twenty-four representative drawings collected under the apt title of Personalities (Secker). Not for me to attempt detailed consideration, even if it were not the duty of every amateur to fall a victim at first hand to Mr. Kapp's amazing art. But one can hardly pass without tribute such things as the head of the Japanese poet on page 1 ("Seer of Visions"), a really wonderful example of much meaning in few lines, or the Wyndham Lewis, the only drawing in the book in which a suggestion of cruelty tinges the satire. Perhaps the most directly laughter-moving pages are those devoted to the brilliant series of musical conductors; is this because we have all stared our two hours into expert familiarity with these variously-tailored backs? But indeed here is a volume of twenty-four joys, or rather twenty-five, the last being anticipation of Mr. Kapp's further activities, which I for one shall await with very genuine interest.