The patient has poached eggs at night, gets up at eleven, has his dinner (gravy soup and curry) at one, mulligatawny soup and meat at five, a free allowance of port wine, averaging a bottle a day. Ten drops of Jereme's opiate every morning, a dose of creosote zinc and gum arabic before his meals, and a dose of quinine after each meal.
There are essays on Mrs. Sartoris and Mrs. Kemble, a brief note on a Roman Christmas, when she saw Lockhart driving with Frederic Leighton, a few slighter pieces, and then, last of all, a tale—Binnie—belonging to the Mrs. Williamson series. Not many people, one supposes, now read Old Kensington or "Miss Thackeray's" other novels, but there should be something of a demand for them by those who first meet her lucid, gentle narrative talent in the story of Binnie.
ONE HUNDRED PICTURES FROM EDEN PHILLPOTTS. Selected by L. H. Brewitt. Methuen. 6s. net.
The snare of descriptive writing in novels is as the snare of decorative passages in an imaginative painting; the descriptions may fail to combine, remain detached from the meaning and purpose of the novel, and finally the novelist may be tempted by his skill in such writing to indulge in it at the expense of his proper task. French novels, the worst of which have as a rule a composition too often absent from ours, rarely abound in purple passages—certainly with no French novelist of equal standing could an admirer do what Mr. Brewitt has done with Mr. Phillpotts. Here are a hundred of Mr. Phillpotts's best decorations, full of observation, sensitive at times to another beauty than the merely observed, but rarely fused by that imaginative ardour which makes some of Mr. Hardy's and Mr. Conrad's descriptive passages an essential part of the novel. Sometimes, especially in his description of violence, Mr. Phillpotts's meaning is obscure: for instance, in the account of the Flood from one book you have a simile which is of no assistance to the picture—"Yelling, like some incarnate and insane manifestation of the elements massed in one, the hurricane launched itself upon the valley." He is more successful as a rule when he catches nature in softer moods, quick with spring or flushed with summer: there is a genuine charm of fancy, if no imaginative depth, in this pastel of a sleeping forest:
The trees indeed sleep, but they also dream. In the heart of every leafless oak a dryad whispers that the days are fleeting; that the icy-footed winter hours are drawing into the snow-wreaths away in their chill processions; that the fountain of the sap will soon rise again to spring's unsealing; that swiftly will the bud-sheath swell and pale and shimmer silkily down, like a cast-off veil at the feet of the vernal beeches.
Mr. Phillpotts rarely drops into that snare of the writer of picturesque prose, the rhythm of blank verse; but his style is not always equal to the demands he makes upon it. It never has the sombre, heavy-hearted gravity of Hardy's, nor the gloomy colour and triumphant ecstasy of Ruskin's. This is indeed a photograph album rather than a book of pictures.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE STORY OF PURTON. A Collection of Notes and Hearsay gathered by Ethel M. Richardson. Bristol: Arrowsmith. 1919. 7s. 6d. net.
Mrs. Richardson, something of a new-comer to Purton, as it would appear, makes no pretensions to original research, and has contented herself so far with giving rather a guide to Purton than a history of the village, a pleasant, ample, and leisurely place in North Wilts, with a fine church and an unusually fine stone-built manor house to its name. Her explanatory sub-title, "Notes and Hearsay," prevents the expectation of anything exhaustive. The notes, though excellent as far as they go, might have been considerably extended with advantage to the book; and as to the hearsay, it must be owned that, so far, she has not heard of much—nothing, we will engage, to what she will hear if she lives in Purton long enough to be accepted by the natives. There is abundant material in every old village in England for a good and useful contribution to history, and, if Mrs. Richardson looks forward (as it is to be hoped she may) to a new edition of her little book, we would recommend to her notice Kingham Old and New, by W. Warde Fowler, which was published by Mr. Blackwell, of Oxford, in 1913, and is a model for any such work. Another which might help her is How to Write the History of a Parish, by the Reverend John Charles Cox, of which a fifth edition was published in 1909. Her first care should be to get hold of the Enclosure Award and Tithe Commutation Map, which ought to be in the vestry. One will give her the names of the Common Fields; the other, compared with the large-scale Ordnance map and helped by local knowledge, should enable her to find them all. Then, with the Parish Registers and, with luck, some Court Rolls, she should be able to get well back in the centuries, and might then make arrangements for a prolonged stay in London and daily attendance at the Public Record Office. What she might find there, or fail to find, there's no telling. If she were fortunate she would light upon some great old Chancery or Exchequer suit—better than the one in the Star-chamber, good as that is, which concerns the adventures of the image of Saint George, and is one of her happiest discoveries—in which the pleadings would be written in pure Shakesperean prose, and the depositions of witnesses record very often the ipsissima verba of the peasantry of its time. Behind all that—since Purton belonged to Malmesbury Abbey—she would find very much more than she has found so far concerning the economy, temporal and spiritual, of her parish and manor. She should undoubtedly find Subsidy Rolls which would record the names and status of the villagers back to the day of the Poll Tax. Some of the early Court Rolls may be there, and possibly also a Survey or Extent, which would give her the services and "boon-works" due from the bondsmen to their lords. There is no limit to be set to what diligence, and help from Mrs. Story-Maskelyne (whose chapter on Braden Forest and the parish boundaries is the best in the book), may recover from the Mausoleum in Fetter Lane. To that adventure we heartily commend Mrs. Richardson, that of a good book she may make a better.