This passage is worth quoting because it suggests what Mr. Bojer has avoided. Sir Hall Caine demands, to all intents and purposes, a book like one of his own, in which there are definite and distinguishable categories of good men and bad men, in which virtue is ranged uncompromisingly against vice. But Sir Hall Caine's books, as this preface would suggest, even if we had never seen one of them, are, since the very earliest of them, negligible both artistically and morally. Mr. Bojer has attempted something different and has succeeded in writing a most unusual and interesting novel. He makes the perennial discovery that good and bad are mixed in all men and he adds the discovery that the sufferings of bad men are not always the results of, or proportionate to, their sins. He has done these things in a story which astonishes the reader by its straightforwardness and simplicity. The characters are presented by means of the barest lines; and no incident or theme is elaborated beyond a few pages. Nevertheless the central idea is adequately worked out, and the whole novel leaves a distinct and vivid impression on the mind.
In Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer discriminating English readers found over a year ago an American novelist whom, alone of his generation, they were able to admire and to consider seriously. This may have been partly because he has learnt something, but not so much as to seem ridiculous, from English models, and because he writes with a restraint, moderation, and detachment which are rare in his literary compatriots. But there was certainly also a definite and individual virtue in him to which critical opinion in this country responded. He had a lively and exact visual gift and a power of rendering great passion without risk of bombast; and these qualities were rightly held to redeem many faults and weaknesses in The Three Black Pennys. In Java Head, published in the middle of last year, the first of these qualities was still perceptible, but, as regarded the second, Mr. Hergesheimer's avoidance of rant appeared to have become a paralysing inhibition. We do not know quite what to make of his third book, Gold and Iron. In the absence of any information to the contrary it would be natural to suppose that it is a later work than the other two; but this seems to us almost impossible and, if indeed it be so, decidedly regrettable. It consists of three nouvelles or "long-short stories," of which the first, Wild Oranges, describing the rescue of a girl from a household living in isolation and terrorised by a homicidal man-servant, is, except for a few passages of description, a negligible piece of the magazine order. In the second and third we do discover traces of the Mr. Hergesheimer whose talents excited us in 1918. One deals with the resuscitation, by a cold, contained, and determined man, of a deserted blast-furnace and his attempt to establish himself as a magnate. The other describes the return of a gold-miner, rich but with hands reddened in one of the incidents of Forty-Nine, from California to his prim and sleepy native village on the coast of Massachusetts. In both of these Mr. Hergesheimer's object is to discover to the reader the interior passions of intense but reserved and hardly articulate personalities. This is an ambition worthy of a novelist of the first rank; and indeed, both in setting himself such a task and in his methods of approaching it, Mr. Hergesheimer reveals himself as a writer of more than common powers. But it can hardly be said to be successfully accomplished here. In glimpses both Alexander Hulings and Jason Burrage are grasped and shown as living men. Hulings comes vigorously and convincingly to life in his duel with Partridge Sinnox, the dangerous gentleman from New Orleans; it is possible to see Burrage, smoking a cheroot, feet up on the brass rail of the hearth, with the refined and yet original Honora Canderay beside him, at his first visit to her. But between such glimpses as these both figures disappear, as though in a moving mist, behind Mr. Hergesheimer's attempt to describe them. He will describe them only in the precise and rigid way which he has chosen, a way which involves omissions, reticences, and silences, subtle appeals to the reader's understanding; and, in these stories at least, he has by no means mastered it. It was used with much more success in The Three Black Pennys and in Java Head, and is probably capable of much further development. If we are right in our surmise that these stories are early work, there is a possibility that Mr. Hergesheimer may yet show himself to be a very remarkable novelist indeed.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LETTERS OF CHARLES SORLEY. Cambridge University Press. 12s. 6d. net.
The value set on irony by the Greeks might well be studied by us moderns. A proper sense of irony teaches both humility and patience, and it will not lead to cynicism unless the basis of the soul be cynical. It teaches, above all, proportion, which is the lesson needed most, perhaps, by modern artists and sociologists, philanthropists and theologians, business men and politicians. These letters of Charles Sorley's, the letters of a young, eager, cultivated boy, are rendered ironical by circumstance. After the ordinary life of a public schoolboy at Marlborough he went, in 1914, before going to Oxford, for an educational holiday in Germany. He stayed in a German family, he was enthusiastic about German things and German people as compared with the English, and he reached England only just in time to escape being a prisoner of war in Germany. The letters are lively, intelligent rather than terse, good-humoured, shrewd and full of that enthusiasm which was Charles Sorley's great natural talent. It is not, however, the essays on Masefield and Housman which give the book its interest. It is the pages on his life in Germany and a few passages on life in the Army which make the volume one of the most remarkable records of the young England which bore the brunt of the war.
How delightful is this passage on the German supper—Sorley lodged in an academic household at Schwerin:
The people come at seven, and talk about the rise in the price of butter till 8. From 8 till 9.30 they eat and drink and talk about the niceness of the victuals, and ask the hostess their cost. From 9.30 to 10.30 they talk about the scarcity of eggs. From 10.30 to 11 they drink beer and cross-examine me about the Anglo-German crisis. From 11 till 12 they make personal remarks and play practical jokes on one another. From 12 to 12.30 they eat oranges and chocolate and declare they must be going now. From 12.30 to 1 they get heavy again and sigh over the increased cost of living in Schwerin. At 1 they begin to scatter. By 2 I am in bed.
That is not the only passage which takes the reader straight into the atmosphere of the Caravaners. There is this anecdote, too:
A friend of sorts of the Bilders died lately; and, when the Frau attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said, "Don't tell me anything sad while I'm eating."