Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer, for whose work as a novelist I have more than once expressed high admiration, has now brought together seven long-short stories under the collective title of The Happy End (Heinemann). Lest however this name and the little preface, in which the writer asserts that his wares "have but one purpose—to give pleasure," should lead you to expect that species of happy ending in which Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill, I think a word of warning may not be wasted. In only three of the tales is the finish a matter of conventional happiness. Elsewhere you have a deserted husband, who has tracked his betrayer to a nigger saloon in Atlantic City, wrested from his purpose of murder by a revivalist hymn; a young lad, having avenged the destruction of his home, returning to his widowed mother to await, one supposes, the process of the law; or an over-fed war profiteer stricken with apoplexy at sight of a boat full of the starved victims of a submarine outrage. You observe perhaps that the epithet "happy" is one to which the artist and the casual reader may attach a different significance. But let not anything I have said be considered as reflecting upon the tales themselves, which indeed seem to me to be masterpieces of their kind. Personally my choice would rest on the last, "The Thrush in the Hedge," a simple history of how the voice of a young tramp was revealed by his chance meeting with a blind and drug-sodden fiddler who had once played in opera—a thing of such unforced art that its concluding pages, when the discovery is put to a final test, shake the mind with apprehension and hope. A writer who can make a short story do that comes near to genius.
If you wish to play the now fashionable game of newspaper-proprietor-baiting you can, with Miss Rose Macaulay, create a possible but not actual figure like Potter and, using it for stalking-horse, duly point your moral; or, with Mr. W. L. George in Caliban (Methuen), you can begin by mentioning all the well-known figures in the journalistic world by way of easy camouflage, so as to evade the law of libel, call your hero-villain Bulmer, attach to him all the legends about actual newspaper kings, add some malicious distortion to make them more exciting and impossible, and thoroughly let yourself go. Good taste alone will decide which is the cleaner sport, and good taste does not happen to be the fashion in certain literary circles at the moment. Of course Mr. George, being a novelist of some skill, has provided a background out of his imagination. The most interesting episode, excellently conceived and worked out, is the only unsuccessful passage in Lord Bulmer's life, the wooing of Janet Willoughby. The awkward thing for Mr. George is that he has so splashed the yellow over Bulmer in the office that there is no use in his pretending that the Bulmer in Mrs. Willoughby's drawing-room is the same man in another mood. He just isn't. Incidentally the author gives us the best defence of the saffron school of journalism I've read—a defence that's a little too good to believe; and some shrewd blows above (and, as I have hinted, occasionally below) the belt.
I want to give the epithet "lush" to The Breathless Moment (Lane), and, although the dictionary asks me as far as in me lies to reserve that adjective for grass, I really don't see why, just for once, I shouldn't do what I like with it. Lush grass is generally long and brightly coloured—"luxuriant and succulent," the dictionary says—and that is exactly what Miss Muriel Hine's book is. She tells the story of Sabine Fane, who, loving Mark Vallance, persuaded him to pass a honeymoon month with her before he went to the Front, though his undesirable wife was still alive. In allowing her heroine to suffer the penalty of this action Miss Hine would appear, as far as plot is concerned, to discourage such adventures. But Sabine is so charming, her troubles end so happily and the setting of West Country scenery is so beautiful that, taken as a whole, I should expect the book to have the opposite effect. The picture of a tall green wave propelling a very solid rainbow, which adorns the paper wrapper and as an advertisement has cheered travellers on the Tube for some weeks past, has no real connection with the story, but perhaps is meant to be symbolical of the book, which, clever and well written as it is, is almost as little like what happens in real life.
The Uses of Diversity (Methuen) is the title of a little volume in which Mr. G. K. Chesterton has reprinted a selection of his shorter essays, fugitive pieces of journalism, over which indeed the casual reader may experience some natural bewilderment at finding, what is inevitable in such work, the trivialities of the day before yesterday treated with the respect of contemporary regard. Many of the papers are inspired by the appearance of a particular book or play. I can best illustrate what I have said above by a quotation from one of them, in which the author wrote (à propos of the silver goblets in Henry VIII. at His Majesty's) that he supposed such realism might be extended to include "a real Jew to act Shylock." For those who recall a recent triumph, this flight of imagination will now have an oddly archaic effect. It is by no means the only passage to remind us sharply that much canvas has gone over the stage rollers since these appreciations were written. Unquestionably Mr. Chesterton, with the unstaled entertainment of his verbal acrobatics, stands the ordeal of such revival better than most. Even when he is upon a theme so outworn as the "Pageants that have adorned England of late," he can always astonish with some grave paradox. But for all that I still doubt whether journalism so much of the moment as this had not more fitly been left for the pleasure of casual rediscovery in its original home than served up with the slightly overweighting dignity of even so small a volume.
In A Tale That Is Told (Collins), Mr. Frederick Niven throws himself into the personality of Harold Grey, who is the youngest son of an "eminent Scottish divine," and constitutes himself the annalist of the family, its private affairs and its professional business in the commerce of literature and art. The right of the family to its annals, notwithstanding that its members are little involved in furious adventures or thrilling romance, is established at once by the very remarkable character of the Reverend Thomas Grey. The duty upon you to read them depends, as the prologue hints, upon whether you are greatly interested in life and not exclusively intent on fiction. When I realised that I must expect no more than an account, without climax, of years spent as a tale that is told, I accepted the conditions subject to certain terms of my own. The family must be an interesting one and not too ordinary; the sons, Thomas (whose creed was "Give yourself," and whose application of it was such that it usually wrecked the person to whom the gift was made), Dick the artist, and John the novelist, must be very much alive; if the big adventures were missing the little problems must be faced; the question of sex must not be overlooked; and of humour none of the characters must be devoid, and the historian himself must be full. Mr. Niven failed me in no particular.