These are days when the more we know about Russia and things Russian the better. Specially timely, then, is the appearance, in an English translation, of The Fishermen (STANLEY PAUL), by DIMITRY GREGOROVITSH. It is a wonderfully appealing story, which has been put into English—presumably by Dr. ANGELO RAPPOPORT, though he is only credited on the title-page with the authorship of the Preface—in such a way that the spirit of the original is admirably preserved. I had not read a couple of pages before the charm of the style laid hold upon me. The story is quite simple, concerned only with a group of peasants, fisher-folk, living on the banks of a great river. GREGOROVITSH is like TOURGENIEV in his devotion to peasant and country types, but otherwise more akin to our own younger school of realists in the minuteness of his observation. Throughout the story abounds in character-study of a kind that, while building up the figure with a thousand details, will add suddenly some vivid touch that brings the whole wonderfully and unforgettably to life. An example of this is Akim, that perfect type of the hopeless incompetent, whose very futility, while it rightly exasperates his fellows, makes him a delight to the reader; so that his death, at the end of the first part, comes with an effect of personal loss. For my own part, as poor Akim had never once before accomplished what he set out to do, I was quite expectant of his recovery, and proportionately disappointed. Throughout also there are pen-pictures of Russian scenery, full of vivid colour; while the story itself, though inevitably in a somewhat minor key, is never sordid or pessimistic. Emphatically therefore a book for everyone to read who cares to know the best in the literature of our great Ally.
MARGARET DELAND'S well-proved pen gives us a spirited sketch of a modernist American woman in The Rising Tide (MURRAY). I don't quite know how this enigmatic sentence, which 1 have long puzzled over and frankly given up, came to escape both author and reader: "Once Mrs. Childs said to tell Fred her Uncle William would say it was perfect nonsense." I feel sure it is not good American. However, Freddy Payton is a young girl who tells the inconvenient truth to everybody about everything, and you may guess that such candour does not make for peace. Mrs. Payton elects to keep her idiot son in the house, and Freddy thinks an asylum is the proper place for him, and says so. The late Mr. Payton was a rake, and Freddy derides her mother's weeds on the ground that the widow is really in her heart waving flags for deliverance, but daren't admit it. Freddy offers cigarettes to the curate, which is apparently a much greater crime over there than here. Freddy finally, carried along by the rising tide, asks the man she loves to marry her, mistaking his friendship for something stronger, and learns that, as the old-fashioned people like her mother realise, men are essentially hunters and "won't bag the game if it perches on their fists." I wonder! But Freddy got a better man—the diffident elderly man who was waiting round the corner. In fact, Freddy is rather a sport, and if Mrs. DELAND intended her as a tract for the times, in the manner of Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD, her shot has miscarried—at least so far as I am concerned.
FORCE OF HABIT.
Edmund Layton, thick in the arm and at times, be it confessed, thick in the head, was so thoroughly in love with The Bright Eyes of Danger (CHAMBERS), and the brighter eyes of Charlotte Macdonell, Jacobitess, that in the rousing days of the YOUNG PRETENDER he not only lightly risked his life when his lady was in need, but more than once went out of his way to make things quite unnecessarily hazardous for himself, when I or any other of his more canny Hanoverian friends was longing to give him warning. For instance, when that taking villain, Philip Macdonell, after beating him in the race for the French treasure buried in the sands of Spey beside the sunken ship (vide the frontispiece mystery chart), soon after fell comfortably into his hands, he had no more discretion than to take him out to fight a duel; whereon, as we others foresaw, the wily villain incontinently disappeared and the fun was all to begin again. Maybe we might forgive him that, for of such staple are good yarns spun, but why in heaven's name should bold Edmund Layton of Liddesdale go about to make himself and us miserable with feckless scruples that ruined the happy ending we had fairly earned? Either he was right to let CHARLES STUART escape that day in the mist, in return for former generosity, or he was wrong; and one would have expected him to make up his mind and there an end, and not fret himself into a pother and Mr. JOHN FOSTER'S story into a most inartistic anti-climax over such a subtlety. All the same a rattling good tale, full of hard knocks as well as bright eyes, and with more than a smack of STEVENSON.
I fancy that I ought perhaps already to know The Wood-Carver of 'Lympus (MELROSE), which, hailing originally from America, seems to have made many friends over here before reaching me in its present form. I am glad, more especially at the present season, to extend a grateful welcome to so kindly and charming a story. Miss MARY E. WALLER has written a singularly refreshing and happy book, full of passages that reveal a great sympathy for country life and the hearts of simple people. Hugh Armstrong, the central figure, is a youth in a New England mountain farm, condemned to perpetual inactivity through an accident. At the beginning of the story we see him, in the depths of misery, visited by a casual passenger from the stage coach, whose attention has been caught by his story as related by the driver. Thenceforward things mend for Armstrong. The stranger interests him in wood-carving; orders pour in, which help to bring comfort to the farm; books and letters arrive from unknown city dwellers. Thus the tale is a record of increasing happiness, but kept (an important thing) from cloying by the tragedy upon which it is built. If you will not be put off by American dialect or by the rather startling discovery that one of the kindliest characters is named Franz, you will, I believe, find a brief stay upon 'Lympus most beneficial to your spirits.