Mr. S. P. B. Mais has not yet extricated himself from the groove into which he has fallen. It is not a wholesome groove, and even if it were I should not wish an author of his capacity to remain a perpetual tenant of it. In Colour Blind (Grant Richards) we are given the promiscuous amours of a schoolmaster, a subject which has apparently a peculiar attraction for Mr. Mais. Jimmy Penruddocke, who tells the story, left the Army and could not find a job until he was offered a mastership at a public school. The school rather than Jimmy has my sympathies. There was nothing peculiarly alluring about this philanderer to account for the devastating magnetism which he exerted upon the female heart. To describe all this orgy of caresses could hardly have been worth anyone's time and trouble; certainly it was not worth Mr. Mais's. I say this with all the more assurance because, greatly as I dislike the main theme of this novel, there are many good things in it. There is, for example, Mark Champernowne (Jimmy's friend), a finely and consistently drawn character, and there are descriptive passages which are vividly beautiful and also some delightful gleams of humour. I think that when Mr. Mais's sense of humour has developed further he will agree with me that a man who loved as promiscuously as Jimmy and then wrote over three hundred pages about it could, without much straining of the truth, be called a cad.
For many reasons I could wish that England were China. It would be nice, for instance, to address the Home Secretary as "Redoubtable Hunter of Criminals" and to call the Board of Exterior Affairs (if we had one) "Wai-wo-poo." I should like my house also to be named "The Palace of the Hundred Flowers." I think there are about a hundred, though I have not counted them. But in China it is above all things necessary to be an ancestor, and this may lead to complications if Mr. G. S. de Morant, who appears to be much more at home with the French and the Oriental idiom than the English, is to be trusted. In the Claws of the Dragon (Allen and Unwin) describes the experiences of a young lady named Monique, who married the Secretary to the Chinese Embassy in Paris and was obliged, after visiting her relations-in-law, to reconcile herself to the introduction of a second wife into the family, in order that their notions of propriety might be respected and an heir born to the line. When she had consented she returned to Paris and wrote the following cablegram from her own mother's house: "You have acted as a good son and a faithful husband. Bring back with you the mother of our (sic) child." And so, the author evidently feels, it all ended happily. His book is an interesting and amusing presentment of an older civilisation, but if it won't strain the Entente I am bound to say that I disagree with his conclusions.
I fear it may sound an unkindly criticism, but my abiding trouble with Broken Colour (Lane) was an inability to get any of the characters, with perhaps one exception, to come alive or behave otherwise than as parts of a thoroughly nice-mannered and unsensational story. Perhaps it was my own fault. Mr. Harold Ohlson (whose previous book I liked) has obviously, perhaps a little too obviously, done his best for these people. It is a tale of two rivalries: that for the heroine, between the penniless artist-hero and a pound-full other; and that in the breast of the p.a.h., between the flesh-pots of commerce and the world-well-lost-for-Chelsea. It is typical of Mr. Ohlson's care that, though one would in such a situation nine times out of ten be safe in backing Art for the double event, he makes so even a match of it between Hubert and Ralph that he leaves the heroine ringing the door-bell of the one immediately after kissing the other. You observe that I was perhaps really more interested in the contest than my opening words would suggest, but it was always in a detached story-book way; except in the case of a mildly unsympathetic secretary, represented as having spent too much time in the contemplation of other persons' affluence, also as owning an expensive-looking stick that made him long to be as rich as it caused him to appear. I hate to think that there can have been anything here to touch a chord in the reviewing breast, but the fact remains that Mr. Burnham stands out for me as the only genuinely human figure in the book.
Blessed, no doubt, is the nation or the man without a history, but blessed too is the biographer who has something definite to write about. Mr. C. Carlisle Taylor, in putting together his Life of Admiral Mahan (Murray), the American naval philosopher and prophet, must have felt this keenly, for rarely can a man whose work was so important that he simply had to have a biography have done so few things of the kind that help to fill up a book. The Admiral not only foresaw the great War before 1914; he even suggested definite details of it—for instance, the loyalty of Italy to Western civilisation and the final surrender of the German fleet; yet in himself, though the writer draws an attractive picture of his home and religious life, he was only a kindly Christian gentleman who lectured to a few naval students. This is not the stuff to turn into a thrilling life-story, yet his studies on Sea-Power in relation to national greatness must certainly be reckoned among the prime causes of world-war. They set the Germans trying to outbuild the British fleet; more fortunately they were an inspiration to naval enthusiasts in this country also. Mr. Taylor has a pleasant chapter describing the immediate recognition and welcome his hero received in England, while it has taken quite a number of chapters to do justice to all the written tributes to his genius that the energetic author has collected. Personally, if ever I had been in doubt about it, I should have been quite willing to take that genius for granted some time before the end, and could indeed recommend the volume much more happily if it were reduced by about half. It will be valuable mainly as a necessary work of reference.
Artist (condescendingly). "I did this last summer. It really isn't much good."