"What," I asked myself, "is just the matter with this apparently quite nice book?" (It was Joan's Green Year, and written by E.L. DOON and published by MACMILLAN.) It is the kind of book that grows out of a romantic disposition and an assiduously stuffed commonplace book. It consists of letters from Joan, a paying guest in the Manor House Farm at Pelton, to her brother Keith, a soldier in India, telling him all about her year of holiday and "soul discipline" in the country, the village gossip, her proposals and her one acceptance, and giving a sort of farmer's calendar of the seasons as interpreted by the guileless amateur. Joan has what is known as a nice mind. But to tell truth she has chosen a difficult and dangerous if alluring art form. Of course letters enable you to evade some of the difficulties of the novelist's task, to be discursive, allusive and incomplete. But you can't be let off anything of the precision and subtlety of your characterisation. On the contrary. And Joan makes everyone in Pelton (except the rustics, whose authenticity I gravely suspect) talk as Joan writes. They have nearly all seen her commonplace book, I judge. Then, again, you must not have (like Joan) a large list of acquaintances, or you breed confusion and dissipate interest accordingly. Joan is very young in many ways. She is extravagant in the matter of the equipment of her heroes. Bob Ingleby, the farmer (a gentleman, because he had been at Winchester), is a "great comely giant," yet wins events one and three of the Hunt Steeplechase, though thrown badly in number two. I have a suspicion that this work is really Joan's tee shot, and that after a notable recovery, which on the best of her present form I can safely prophesy, she will reach her green year next time.
Mrs. T.P. O'CONNOR has written a fascinating book. My Beloved South she calls it, and PUTNAMS publish it. There is not a lifeless page in the 427 that make up a bountiful feast. Every one contains vivid reproductions of incidents in social life in the South "befo' de wa'" and after. At the outset we make the acquaintance of a typical Southron, Mrs. O'CONNOR's grandfather, Governor of Florida when it was still a Territory, with native Indians fighting fiercely for their land and homes. Mrs. O'CONNOR was, of course, not to the fore in those early days. But so steeped is she in lore of the South, much of it gained from the lips of nurses and out-door servants, so keen is her sympathy, so quick and true her instinct that she is able to revivify the old scenes and reproduce the atmosphere of the time. The darkey nurse of earliest childhood lives again, sometimes bringing with her plantation songs like "Voodoo-Bogey-Boo," quaintly musical. Many passages of the grandfather's conversations are preserved, in which we may detect the voice of the gifted granddaughter. But the influence of heredity is strong, more especially "down South." Also there are many charming stories redolent of the South. I was about to mention the page on which will be found the thrilling history of a mule aptly named "Satan." On reflection I won't spoil the reader's pleasure in unexpectedly coming upon it somewhere about the middle of the book. Nobody—man or woman, girl or boy—who begins to read My Beloved South will skip a page. So the story cannot be overlooked.
In Lost Diaries (DUCKWORTH) Mr. MAURICE BARING travels by an easy road to humour, and he does not pound it with too laborious feet. This is perhaps a fortunate thing, for a farcical reconstruction of history in the light of modern sentiment and circumstances might easily tire; a Comic History of England, for instance, is stiffer reading to-day than GARDNER or GREEN. Sometimes, however, Mr. BARING seems to carry to extreme lengths his conscientious avoidance of efforts to be funny; and in the imaginary records of one or two of his subjects there is little more to laugh at than the unaided fancy of the student has long ago perceived. Tristram loved two Iseults, and JOHN MILTON was an exasperating husband; but these things I knew, and the author of Lost Diaries has made no more capital out of the situations than the eternal merriment which the bare statement of the facts inspires. But where Mr. BARING, pleasantly disdainful alike of consistency and taste, examines the pocket-book of the "Man in the Iron Mask," and finds him complaining of the noise and disturbance in dungeon after dungeon until he is removed at last to the lotus island of the Bastille; or records the blameless botanical pursuits of TIBERIUS in seclusion; or the first consumption of the Colla di Gallo by COLUMBUS in the newly discovered West, he is, for all the simplicity of his methods, amusing enough. Yet even so I am inclined to think that the first of his essays, which reads like an actual transcript from the jottings of a nineteenth-century private-school boy, is the diary which I most heartily congratulate Mr. BARING on having rediscovered, and which I should be least willing for him to lose again.
With the Land Question staring us in the face, Folk of the Furrow (SMITH ELDER) should attract the attention of those who wish thoroughly to understand what the agricultural labourer wants and why he wants it. Mr. CHRISTOPHER HOLDENBY is no amateur, for as Mr. STEPHEN REYNOLDS has lived with fishermen and shared their daily lives so he has lodged in labourers' cottages and hoed and dug with the best (and worst) of them. The result is a book that is stamped with the hall-mark of a great sincerity; and three facts at least can be gathered from it by the very dullest of gleaners. First, and I think foremost, that the decencies of life cannot be observed if children of very various ages are to be crowded into cottages too small to hold them; secondly, that it is useless to expect morality from youths who have few or no amusements provided for them; thirdly, that the passing of the old families and the advent of the week-end "merchant princes" do not make a change for the better. All which may be stale news, but after reading this book I think that you will admit that Mr. HOLDENBY has contrived to make an old tale very impressive. In some instances it is true that I could bring evidence directly in opposition to his, but on the whole he deserves well for the way in which he has won the confidence of a class naturally suspicious and silent, and for his manner of stating his case. Had I for my sins to cram our M.P.'s for the debates that lie before them, I should feed them liberally upon Folk of the Furrow.