I am distinctly grateful to ROSE MACAULAY for What Not (CONSTABLE). It brought me the pleasantest end to anything but a perfect English Spring day. She has wit, not so common a gift that you can afford just to take it for granted; she knows when to stop, selecting not exhausting; and she makes her epigrams by the way, as it were, without exposing the process of manufacture. (Other epigrammatists please copy.) Miss MACAULAY'S "prophetic comedy" is a joyous rag of Government office routine, flappery, Pelmania, Tribunals, State advertising, the Lower Journalism and "What Not." That audacious eugenist, Nicky Chester, first Minister of Brains in the post-war period of official attempts to raise the nation from C3 to something nearer A1 on the intellectual plane, happens, because of his family history, to be uncertified for marriage. He also happens to fall very desperately in love with his secretary, Kitty Grammont, and the conflict between duty and desire becomes the theme—perhaps just a little too heavy—of an extravaganza that is happiest in its lighter and more irreverent moments. Which is to say that What Not wanders out of the key. But what on earth does that matter if one is made to laugh quite often and to smile almost continuously at a very shrewd piece of observation, whimsicality and tempered malice? And you will like the serene Pansy Ponsonby (out of "Hullo, Peace!"), who could scarcely be called Kitty's "sister-in-law," but was of the most faithful. The odd thing is that under all her gibing the author seems to have a queer furtive admiration for her precious Ministry of Brains.
Among the many things I like in DORETHEA CONYERS' novels is the artistic subtlety, achieved by few of our other novelists, with which she manages to write them as it were in character. I am quite sure that if Berenice Ermyntrude Nicosia Nevin, who is called by her initials on the cover and inside by what they spell, had tried to write a novel it would have been remarkably like B.E.N. (METHUEN). There would have been the same keen delight in horses, hunting and Irish scenery, and the same cheerful disregard for such trifles as spelling or such conventions as making quite sure that your reader knows which character is speaking at any given moment, and the same excellent humour, which, if it is at the expense of the Irish, is kindly enough for all that. It seems to me that in her new novel Mrs. CONYERS, wisely refusing to stray to that suburbia in which her gifts lack this charm, has recaptured much of the careless rapture of her earliest books; and very careless and very rapturous they wore. But I am not quite sure that in real life even Ben, when as second whip to the East Cara hounds she lost her horse, would have found an aeroplane useful to catch up with. In case it should be objected that anything so funny as the tea at Miss Talty's never could happen, even in the Caher Valley district, I want to put it on record here and now that it could and does.
The Mystery Keepers (LANE), by MARION FOX, reminds me of the old riddle, "What is it that has feathers and two legs, and barks like a dog?"—the answer being a stork. People who protest that a stork doesn't bark like a dog are told that that part is put in to make it harder. I find that the greater part of the mystery kept by The Mystery Keepers is put in to make it harder. The Abbey at Clynch St. Mary has a "coise" put on it by the last Abbess, and every direct male heir expires punctually on his twenty-first birthday. The actual agency is a poisoned ring concealed in the frame of a portrait of the malevolent Abbess and is in the custody of the Otway family, who enjoy a prescriptive if nebulous right to be stewards of the property. Just how or why the Otways—noble fellows, we are given to understand—carry out the deceased Abbess's nefarious wishes with such precision and despatch is not explained. Anyway the mother of the last victim, who has found out the secret, steals the ring, murders the Otway of the period, and retires to a lunatic asylum after her son has himself stolen the ring from her workbox and poisoned himself into the next world. That finishes it. The ring retires to a museum and the proper people marry each other. It is a slender and quite impossible story, but told in a clever way which goes far to redeem its lack of substance.
The Graftons (COLLINS) is a sequel to Mr. ARCHIBALD MARSHALL'S former chronicle of the same pleasant family. Herein you shall find them, pursuing the even tenor of their prosperous way, father, son and charming daughters, and arriving placidly at the point where, in the natural sequence of events, these daughters leave the paternal nest for others provided by eligible mates. Their courtships, and some mild uncertainty as to whether papa Grafton, well-preserved and wealthy widower, will or will not follow the example of his female offspring, provide the entire matter of the book. For the rest Mr. MARSHALL is content to mark time (and very pleasantly) with pictures of English country life at its most comfortable, and in particular with some comedy scenes, excellently done, turning upon the often delicate relationship of Hall and Parsonage. There are a couple of clerical portraits in the book that seem to me as lifelike as anything of the kind since Barchester. Apart from this the outstanding virtue of the Graftons is the reality of their dialogue. Precisely thus do, or did, actual people speak in the quiet old times before the War; precisely thus also did nothing whatever of any consequence happen to the vast majority of them. Since, however, the truth and charm of the tale depend upon this absence of the sensational, I must the more regret that Messrs. COLLINS, who have printed it exquisitely, should have been betrayed into a coloured wrapper of almost grotesque ineptitude.
In Graduation (CHATTO AND WINDUS) there is an essential femininity about Miss IRENE RUTHERFORD McLEOD'S style and general attitude that imposes limitations; it is a quality that shows itself not only in her plot, but in her characters, the three reputed males who figure therein being as fine examples of true womanliness as you need wish to meet. Frieda was the heroine (a name somehow significant); and of the trouser-wearers, the first, Geoffrey, was a cat-like deceiver, who fascinated poor Frieda for ends unspecified, pretended (the minx!) to be keen on the Suffrage movement, which he wasn't, and concealed a wife; the second was a Being too perfect to endure beyond Chapter 10, where he expires eloquently of heart-failure, leaving Alan, the third, to bear the white man's burden and clasp Frieda to his maidenly heart. This sentimental progress is, I suppose, what is implied by the title and the symbolic staircase (if it is a staircase?) on the wrapper. But my trouble was that I could never discern in the sweet girl-graduate any development of character from the pretentious futility of her earliest appearance. Perhaps I am prejudiced. Undeniably Miss McLEOD can draw a certain type of prig with a horrible facility. But the antiquated modernity of her scheme, flooded as it is with the New Dawn of, say, a decade ago, and its bland disregard of everything that has happened since, ended by violently irritating me. Others may have better luck.