It is a tribute at once to the art of her treatment and the actuality of her theme that, after reading the delicate little study of modern romance that ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL calls The Lovers (HEINEMANN), I cannot determine whether the clever writer was reproducing or inventing—she begins so convincingly with the statement that it was her first chapter, itself an article in The Century, describing the life of The Lovers as she watched it from her window, that brought about her friendship with the originals, and thus her knowledge of their further history. Anyhow, true or not, it is the kind of story that has been going on all round us in these days of love and heroism. Mrs. PENNELL first began to watch her pair of amoureux in their attic, which was overlooked from her higher window (most readers could probably make a shrewd guess at its postal district) in those seemingly so distant years when the young champions of artistic London used to meet at a certain café, wonderfully clad, to consume vast quantities of milk. Then came the War; the boy-husband enlisted, went to the Front—and the end is as we all have known it many and many times. In this little book the too familiar story is given with a restraint and absence of striving after effect that leave me, as I say, uncertain whether its appeal is due to art or actuality. But in either case Mrs. PENNELL has told it very well.
"Father, what is the difference between Tories and Radicals?" "Radicals, my dear, are the infamous crew who wish to destroy all the noble institutions for which the Tories would give their life-blood." "And which are you, Father?" I have inflicted this ancient (and, I always think, rather touching) scrap of dialogue upon you because it exactly illustrates my impression of The Soul of Ulster (HURST AND BLACKETT). In other words, this little book, written as ably and attractively as you would expect from the author of The First Seven Divisions, is really less a dispassionate survey of the Home Rule difficulty than a piece of special pleading for the Northern cause. According, therefore, to your own attitude towards this problem will characters occupies her rural stage—an old grandmother, be your estimate of Lord ERNEST HAMILTON'S arguments. To the bigoted (or confirmed) Orangeman they will seem revelation; to the confirmed (or bigoted) Nationalist they will as clearly seem rubbish. Even I, who admit the justice of the author's contentions, fancied now and again (as in the matter of the "Peep-o'-Day Boys," for example) that a slightly more generous admission of faults on his own side would have strengthened the presentation of his case. One of the most interesting chapters of a quite short volume is that in which the author explains his belief, at first rather startling, that the eventual solution of the vexed question may be provided through the Sinn Fein movement. That hope, and the reasons for it, are certainly alone worth the half-crown for which you can examine them.
"SEE THAT, SIR? 'FARM LABOURERS, MINIMUM TWENTY-FIVE SHILLINGS A WEEK.' NOW, SIR, WOULD YOU ADVISE ME TO LEAVE MY PRESENT OCCUPATION AND TAKE UP FARM-WORK?"
SERGE AKSAKOFF, a distinguished Russian writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, gave the world a portrait of his grandfather. It is now translated with a singular felicity by Mr. J.D. DUFF, under the title, A Russian Gentleman (ARNOLD), and I should like to say that I, who have suffered something from translations out of the Russian, have very rarely read one which ran with such plausible smoothness and gave so clear an impression of a charming original. STEFAN MIHAILOVITCH BAGROFF was reckoned a good sort and a just if rather uncompromising man. His character is drawn with faithful exactness and praised with simple filial appreciation. The foibles of this worthy patriarch, such as the dragging of his wife along the floor when he was excessively annoyed, so that she went with her head bound for a year thereafter, are excused on the ground of his general decency. And indeed he was a lovable old boy, and the simple and unselfconscious artistry with which the author develops his character, and that of his daughter-in-law, SOFYA NIKOLAYEVNA, delights the jaded literary palate. AKSAKOFF has a quite singular power of selecting just the incident, the phrase, the gesture, the feature of the landscape which make you exclaim with a start, "Why, I'm seeing and hearing all this!" It is such a book as an historian of the modern school would delight in, more engrossing than fiction of the most realistic type. There is incident in it too—as of the degenerate KUROLYESSOFF, a cousin-in-law of MIHAILOVITCH, who used to flog his serfs, sometimes to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern Orenburg into the adjoining province of Ufa, and the building of the mill and the dam, are astonishingly vivid and agreeable.
A Maid o' Dorset (CASSELL) can be recommended to anyone in need of light refreshment after a course of sterner literature. Here we are back again in the world of small things; but if "M.E. FRANCIS'S" theme is trivial there is no denying the art with which she handles it. Just a quartette of characters occupies her rural stage—an old grandmother, wise with the wisdom of years, her granddaughter, a middle-aged farmer and a young gipsy "dairy-chap." To the horror of her relations the Maid o' Dorset conceives an infatuation for the gipsy, a clever rogue but no match for the grandmother. I have met a good many farmers in my time, but never one so simple-minded as Solomon Blanchard. It is all very Franciscan, and seems easy enough, but if you think, for that reason, that you could do it yourself, you couldn't. Its charm lies in its fragrance, and that is a quality which is not lightly come by.