It is probable, I think, that you will not have turned many pages of Brenda Walks On (Hutchinson) before being struck by a certain pleasing incongruity between its matter and style. Sir Frederick Wedmore is such an artist in words, so punctilious in the niceties of their employment, that to find him writing a story of modern stage-life, and using for it—with, as it were, a certain delicate deliberation—phrases peculiar to the jargon of the class of which it treats, gives one a series of small shocks. It is like hearing slang from a Dean. As a matter of fact, though, I was wrong in calling Brenda Walks On a story. It is rather a disquisition about stage people, stage art and life, and anything else whatever upon which Sir Frederick wishes to talk at the moment, from the beauties of the North-Eastern coast (the Scarborough part of the book carried me back to the far-off days of Renunciations) to the treasures of Hertford House. Even Brenda's chief suitor is capable of breaking off the avowal of his love to deliver a few well-chosen remarks about theatrical rents and the hazards of management. This suitor, Penfold, is perhaps the nearest approach to an actual character that the book contains. He was a writer of papers upon the drama of whom the author observes, "With a ready pen, indeed, Heaven forbid that he should have been cursed! It was better to have a careful one, faithfully ordered, allowing him to make sensible utterance of some part of the knowledge and thought that were in him." Which, by a happy coincidence, is exactly my verdict author's method in this graceful causerie.
Christina's Son (Wells Gardner) is a disarming book. It overcomes criticism by the direct simplicity of its attack, in which only later do you begin to suspect a concealed art. Miss W. M. Letts tells a tale that (you might say) has nothing in it; nothing certainly at all sensational or strikingly original. But this story of a middle-class North-country woman grips the attention, and holds it, by some quality hard to define. Christina, as wife of a man she can never greatly love, and, later, as mother of a son whom she adores but only half understands, becomes, for all her commonplace environment, a figure that dwells in the memory because of what you feel to be its absolute truth. The atmosphere of the story is so crystal clear that every detail of its chief characters stands out with the distinctness of a landscape after rain. And because, by all the rules, these characters should be so little interesting, and the very provincial society in which the thirty or so years of the book pass is so entirely undistinguished, you are faintly astonished all the way through (at least I was) at not being bored. I see that one critic has praised a previous story by Miss Letts for its humour, should not have picked this out as a characteristic of Christina's Son. Rather has it a certain gravity and sobriety of aim, which in part explains its appeal; if there is humour it is generally below the surface and never insisted upon. There is a moment when its rather restrained style rises suddenly to rare beauty, where the theme is old age; and throughout there is a maturity of judgment in the writing that will make it perhaps less attractive to the young than to those whose outlook has reached the same stage.
A favourite of the halls was greatly pleased with the new poster of himself——
until he came to a hoarding where the exigencies of space had played havoc with the composition.
If I were to give away the plot of Miss Mary L. Pendered's The Secret Sympathy (Chapman and Hall) I think that you would sniff. It is not likely to cause animated discussion in intellectual circles. We are introduced to a girl who, finding herself reduced from affluence to poverty, takes a garage and runs it with success, and we become acquainted with a chauffeur and a peer, and the former turns out to be—but that is just what I am not going to tell you. If you want a book in which the hero is a very perfect gentleman indeed and the villain really is a villain, then here you are. Miss Pendered's scheme is not too subtle, but what she has set out to do she has done, and done well. Although her characters play their part in the War, she resists the temptation to smother them with V.C.'s and other decorations, and for this abstinence and for Miss Chetwynd, a middle-aged spinster of shrewd sense and humour, I warmly commend her. I confess myself in love with Miss Chetwynd and should dearly like to hear her candid opinion of The Secret Sympathy. But I feel sure that, if she smiled a little at the wonderfulness of it all, her final verdict would be as benevolent as mine.