(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)
How you regard Miss May Sinclair’s latest story, The Romantic (Collins), will entirely depend upon your attitude towards the long-vexed question of the permissible in art. If you hold that all life (which in this association generally means something disagreeable) is its legitimate province and that genius can transmute an ugly study of morbid pathology into a romance, you will admire the force of this vivid little book; otherwise, I warn you frankly, you are like to be repelled by the whole business. The title, to begin with, is an irony as grim as anything that follows, in what sense you will find as the story reveals itself. The Romantic is a picture—what do I say? a vivisection—of cowardice, seen through the horrified eyes of a woman who loved the subject of it. The scene is the Belgian battlefields, to which John Conway, being unfitted for active service, had taken out a motor-ambulance, with Charlotte Redhead as one of his drivers. All the background of this part of the tale is wonderfully realised, a thing of actual and unforgetable experience. Here gradually the first tragedy of Conway is made clear, though shielded and ignored as long as possible by the loyalty of fellow-workers and the obstinate disbelief of the girl. Perhaps you think I am making too much of it all; treacherous nerves were the lot of many spiritually noble men in that hell. But little by little conviction of a deeper, less understandable, horror creeps upon the reader, only to be explained and confirmed on the last page. To be honest, The Romantic is an ugly, a detestably ugly book, but of its cleverness there can be no question.
It would appear that Mr. A. E. W. Mason is another of those who hold that the day of war-novels is not yet done. Anyhow, The Summons (Hodder and Stoughton) shows him dealing out all the old familiar cards, spies and counter-spies, submarines and petrol bases and secret ink. It must be admitted that the result is unexpectedly archaic. Perhaps also Mr. Mason hardly gives himself a fair chance. The "summons" to his hero (who, being familiar with the Spanish coast, is required when War breaks out to use this knowledge for submarine-thwarting) is too long delayed, and all the non-active service part of the tale suffers from a very dull love-interest and some even more dreary racing humour. Archaic or not, however, Hillyard’s anti-spy adventures, in an exquisite setting that the author evidently knows as well as his hero, are good fun enough. But the home scenes had (for me at least) a lack of grip and conviction by no means to be looked for from a writer of Mr. Mason’s experience. His big thrill, the suicide of the lady who first sends by car to the local paper the story of her end and then waits to confirm this by telephone before making it true, left me incredulous. I’m afraid The Summons can hardly be said to have found Mr. Mason in his customary form.
"To write another person’s life-history in the first person, and yet give to it the verisimilitude of a genuine autobiography, would under ordinary circumstances be a difficult if not impossible undertaking." So Mr. C. E. Gouldsbury tells us in a note to Reminiscences of a Stowaway (Chapman and Hall), and most of us will cordially agree with him. But, after reading this volume of reminiscences, I think you will also agree that Mr. Gouldsbury has acquitted himself admirably of a most difficult task. The man into whose skin, if I may so express it, he has temporarily tried to fit himself was Mr. Alexander Douglas Larymore, who started his adventurous career as a stowaway in an "old iron tub," and eventually became Inspector-General of Jails in India. For nearly forty years Mr. Gouldsbury was Mr. Larymore’s intimate friend, and has had sufficient data at his disposal to do justice to what was a remarkably full and interesting life. Possibly those of us who retain a tender spot in our hearts for stowaways may regret that Mr. Larymore grew tired of the sea; but his adventures were as numerous and amusing on land as on water, and they are also valuable for the strong light they throw on the India of some years ago. Mr. Gouldsbury has at once provided a lasting tribute to the memory of his friend and written a book which both in style and matter would be hard to beat.
The King. "Look here—this throne won’t do; it is impossible for us to look dignified in it."