The Great Desire (Hodder and Stoughton) is a novel full of shrewd philosophy and excellent talk. Mr. Alexander Black sets out to prove nothing, to justify no political or social attitude, but just to draw his fellow-Americans as he sees them going about their war-time business, the "great desire" being simply the thing that is uppermost in the mind of each one. As a composite picture of what New York thought about the business of getting into the War the result could hardly be bettered. One never feels that latent antagonism which readers, even though they may agree with him, unconsciously experience towards an author who seems to be arguing a point. Mr. Black gives the extreme views of the blatant patriot, and of the anarchist and socialist who cannot see the distinction between arguing against war on paper and arguing against this War on the street corner. He makes us realise the people who think only how to make the War an adjunct of themselves and those who desire only to make themselves a useful adjunct of the War. He draws his types cleverly and states the case of each one fairly, but with a humorous restraint and from a standpoint of absolute detachment. The Great Desire has plenty of charm regarded merely as a story, but I recommend it especially to those who are apt to judge the Americans by their politicians or to assess New York on the basis of the Hearst newspapers.
If it were only for his complete fearlessness in following well-worn convention and his apparent reliance on his readers' ignorance or want of memory, Mr. J. Murray Gibbon's Drums Afar (Lane) would be rather a remarkable book in these psycho-analytical days. His hero actually has the audacity to have blue eyes and fair hair, to start his career in the House, and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in a hospital, where his fiancée, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational cliché. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on leaving America, where he has become engaged to a wealthy Chicagan's daughter, he quotes—
"I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more."
And, although the girl is annoyed, it is not on account of the citation. Much of the story, however, deals with Chicago, and since my previous knowledge of that city could have easily been contained in a tin of pressed beef I can pardon Mr. Gibbon for being as informative about it as he is about Oxford colleges. (He seems, by the way, to have a rooted contempt for Balliol, which I had always supposed was a quite well-meaning place.) On the whole, either in spite or because of its rather Baedeker-like qualities, Drums Afar will be found quite a restful and readable book.
Somewhere in the course of the tale that gives its title to The Blower of Bubbles (Chambers) the character who is supposed to relate it denies that he is a sentimentalist. I may as well say at once that, if this denial is intended to apply also to Mr. Arthur Beverley Baxter, who wrote the five stories that make up the volume, a more comprehensive misstatement was never embodied in print. Because, from the picture on the wrapper, representing a starry-eyed infant conducting an imaginary orchestra, to the final page, the book is one riot of sentiment—plots, characters and treatment alike. Not that, save by the fastidious, it must be considered any the worse for this; even had not Mr. Baxter's hearty little preface explained the conditions of active service under which it was composed, themselves enough to excuse any quantity of over-sweetening. I will not give you the five long-shorts in detail. The first, about a German child and a young man with heart trouble, shows Mr. Baxter at his worst, with the sob-stuff all but overwhelming a sufficiently nimble wit. My own favourite is the fifth tale, a spirited and generous tribute to England's war effort. (I should explain that the book, and I suppose the author also, is by origin Canadian.) This last story, told partly in the form of letters to his editor in New York by an American officer and journalist, has all the interest that comes of seeing ourselves as others see us; though I could not but think that the narrator erred in making the haughty Lady Dorothy, daughter of his noble hosts, exclaim, on the entrance of a footman with a letter, "Pardon me, it's the mail." So there you are. If you have a taste for stories that make no pretence of being other than fiction pure and simple, limpidly pure and transparently simple (yet witty too in places), try these; otherwise pass.
