As was to be expected, one of the signs of the times in literature, not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude towards war. The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose) useful picture. I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story called The Secret Battle (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P. HERBERT, whose initials are familiar to Punch readers under work of a lighter texture. This is an intimate study, inspired throughout by a cold fury of purpose that can be felt on every page, of the destruction of a young man's spirit in the insensate machinery of modern war. There is no other plot, no side issues, no relief. From the introduction of Harry Penrose, fresh from Oxford, embarking like a gallant gentleman upon the adventure of arms, to the tragedy that blotted him out of a scheme that had misused and ruined him, the record moves with a dreadful singleness of intent. Sometimes, one at least hopes, the shadows may have been artificially darkened. It seems even to-day hardly credible that events should conspire to such futility of error. But as a story with a purpose, not, in spite of the publisher's description, a novel, The Secret Battle certainly deserves the epithet "striking." It is a blow from the shoulder.
The worst of quotations is that either their staleness is tedious or their unfamiliarity irritates. Mr. S.G. TALLENTYRE has at least one, generally of the latter sort, and oftener half-a-dozen, on every page of Love Laughs Last (BLACKWOOD), or, at any rate, that is one's first impression of the book; while the second is that the number of characters is not much less. It follows that in trying to identify all the persons to whom he may or may not have been introduced in the previous pages, and all the phrases in inverted commas he has certainly seen somewhere else sometime, the truly diligent reader will be kept faithfully at his task—a pleasant one possibly, but just a thought too much like hard work to be quite entertaining in a novel. Apart from all this and an occasional obscure sentence there is nothing much to grumble at in a story that tells how David, the sailor, unlearned in the ways of ladies, became engaged for insufficient reasons to one Theo, only to fall promptly in love with another, certainly much nicer, called Nancy; and how still a third, Sally, with various other people, intent on rescuing him from his dilemma, made a most unscrupulous and indeed most improbable conspiracy against number one, who was unpopular. One can't help feeling that they were all, including the author, a bit hard on Theo, whose philanthropic notions were really too good for the amount of sense allotted her to work them out with. Most of the rest of them would have nothing to do with raising the masses, but, after the comfortable fashion of early nineteenth-century days, were content to let well alone at eight shillings a week. Perhaps it was this restful attitude that decided the publishers to claim for this volume the distinctive quality of "charm."
After a considerable interval, Mr. ARNOLD LUNN has followed The Harrovians with another school story, Loose Ends (HUTCHINSON). This, however, is a tale not so much about boys as about masters, the real hero being not Maurice Leigh (with whose adventures school-novelists of an earlier day would solely have concerned themselves), the pleasantly undistinguished lad who enters Hornborough in the first chapter and leaves it in the last, but Quirk, the young and energetic master, whose efforts to vitalize the very dry bones of Hornborough education hardly meet the success that they deserve. Concerning this I am bound to add that I found some difficulty in accepting Mr. LUNN'S picture as quite fair to an average public school in the early twentieth century. That its authorities should have been so violently perturbed by a proposal to teach SHAKSPEARE histrionically, or by the spectacle of boys enjoying modern poetry, surely supposes conditions almost incredibly archaic. This, however, does nothing to detract from the admirably-drawn figure of Quirk himself, bursting with energy, enthusiasm and intolerance, overcoming passive resistance on the part of the boys, only to be shipwrecked upon the cast-iron prejudice of the staff. That his apotheosis should have been translation to Rugby, where he finds "the beaks much easier to get on with," perhaps shows that Mr. LUNN does not intend those of Hornborough as wholly typical of the most abused race in fiction. For the rest, the boy characters of the book are presented with a quiet realism very refreshing after some recent "sensational revelations." Mr. LUNN'S boys, alike in their speech and outlook, are admirably observed; indeed the persons of the tale struck me throughout as being better than its rather out-of-date happenings.
My landlady assures me that His Daughter (COLLINS) is a "lovely story," and I think it only right that Mr. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS should have the benefit of her criticism, since my own is distinctly less favourable. Mr. MORRIS showed signs at one time of being able to write a first-class novel of adventure, but he abandoned this field for a more lucrative appeal to the Great American Bosom, whose taste, if I may say so without endangering the League of Nations, is more in harmony with my landlady's than with mine. His latest hero is one of those magnificent fellows whom no woman can resist—or so they tell him. Anyway he is irresistible enough to have two daughters, one born in lawful wedlock, the other—of whose existence he is unaware for a long time—in Paris. Which of the daughters is the one referred to in the title is not clear, nor does it really seem to matter, since one of them dies, and he undertakes, while in the throes of remorse, not to make himself known to the other. Meanwhile the War has happened along and given everyone who needed it an opportunity of redeeming his Past, and, as the hero is getting old and has had a nasty crash in an aeroplane, it seems possible that an era of comparative continence has really set in. At this juncture we part with him—I without a pang; my landlady, I well know, with a sigh for his lost irresistibility.
Barry Dunbar, the heroic padre of Mr. RALPH CONNOR'S story, The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), hailed from Canada and went to France with the Canadians. Endowed with superb physical beauty and considerable musical gifts he started, you might think, with fortune in his favour. But at the outset he was a tactless young man and had a good deal to learn before he was in any way competent to teach. Mr. RALPH CONNOR has described with skill and great sincerity the horrors of the War in the earlier days; but for me he has spoilt both his story and the effect of it by his extreme sentimentality. He is persistently concerned to raise a lump in my throat. I readily believe that he was actuated by the highest motive in trying to show us how responsive the Canadians were when their spiritual needs were attended to by a man of courage and understanding. But I dislike an excess of emotional spasms, and in these Mr. CONNOR has indulged so freely that his book can only be for other tastes than mine.