LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
Airedales and collies, according to Lieut.-Colonel E. H. Richardson, are notable for a truly remarkable and admirable characteristic. They would honestly rather be at work than just playing round. All the same, no one guessed before the War what they, and many other kinds of dogs, were able and willing to do for their country in emergency on guard and sentry duty, and, most of all, as battle-field messengers. Moreover it took the genius of the man who of all the world knows most of their mind to discover it. His book, British War Dogs (Skeffington), is neither very brilliantly written nor particularly well arranged (it contains quite a lot of repetitions and a system of punctuation all its own), but it is of more than average interest. The author details the training of war-dogs—literally "all done by kindness"—and records many thrilling exploits and heroisms of his friends. Further, he states at some length some rather attractive views on dog metaphysics, of which one need say no more than that, if you wish to believe that your four-footed pal has a soul to be saved as well as a body to be patted, here is high authority to support you. I think what one misses all through these pages is the dog's own story. Without it one never seems to get quite to grips with the subject. What were Major's thoughts and feelings, for instance, when carrying a message twelve miles in an hour over all obstacles, dodging the shells as he ran? Not even Colonel Richardson can find a way to get a personal interview out of him.
All the Scandinavian countries have in the last twenty-five years produced novel-writers of power and distinction, but with the single exception of the Swedish authoress, Selma Lagerlöf, whose great novel, Gosta Berling, was awarded the Nobel Prize, and the Norwegian, Knut Hamsun, whose extremely unpleasant book, Hunger, was published in this country a score of years ago, few if any of them have been made accessible to the average English reader. Now the Gyldendal Publishing Company of Copenhagen has undertaken the neglected task of producing English translations of the best Scandinavian fiction, the latest of which is Guest the One-Eyed, by the Icelandic novelist, Gunnar Gunnarsson. It is not a particularly powerful narrative, and is marked by the characteristic inconsequence that tends to convert the Scandinavian novel into a mélange of family biographies; yet the author has been successful in weaving into his chapters some of the beauty and magic of his native land, lovely and forbidding by turns, and the charm and simplicity of its people. So when he makes Ormarr Orlygsson fling away the strenuous work of ten years and a promising career as a great violinist to return to a pastoral life on his father's Iceland estates, the step seems neither strange nor unnatural. So with the perfectly villainous Sera Ketill, who at the culmination of unparalleled infamies suddenly repents and becomes the far-wandering and well-beloved Guest, we do not feel anything strained in the author's assumption that in Iceland, at any rate, such things easily happen. Guest the One-Eyed is not a noteworthy novel in the sense that Gosta Berling was. Yet one would not have missed reading it.
It is interesting to watch heredity at play. Given the inclination to write, what kind of a first book should we get from the son of one of the most cultured and sensitive classical scholars and translators of this or any day and from the grandson of the painter of the Legend of the Briar Rose? The question is answered by Mr. Denis Mackail's What Next? (John Murray), which on examination turns out to be a farcical novel. The story has certain technical weaknesses, but these are forgotten in the excitements of the chase, for the main theme is the tracking down of a coarse capitalist who defrauded the hero of his fortune and did something very low against England. With the assistance of a new character in fiction, a super-valet, justice is done and we are all (except the coarse capitalist and his son) extremely happy. Mr. Mackail has invented some excellent scenes and he carries them off with gaiety and spirit. In his second book (and for the answer to What Next? we shall not, I imagine, have long to wait) he will amend certain little faults, not the least of which is a tendency to give us the most significant events in the form of retrospective narrative instead of letting us see them as they occur.