OVER AND ABOVE. By J. E. Gurdon. Collins. 7s. 6d. net.
This is a curiously naïve and artless story of the adventures of an airman, as seen through the eyes of one Warton, whom we meet crossing to France for the first time and leave going back to England on transfer to home service, with a Military Cross and two bars. It is written with evident knowledge and covers most of the typical incidents in an airman's life at the front. It is written, too, with complete sincerity, and it is easy to discern the author's personality behind the speeches of his characters and his own asides. Yet for all this it is hardly a success, hardly so convincing or informing as a number of books that have been built on a much slighter foundation of first-hand knowledge. The fights described are not clear or lucid, the persons introduced never become real. All this goes to show that both some natural gift for, and some practice in, literary composition are necessary for any book as well as experience of the life it depicts.
THE NEW DECAMERON. By Various Authors. Blackwell. 6s. net.
The New Decameron is a fascinating title which covers a disappointing book. The greatness of the original Decameron springs, after all, in the first place from the extraordinary beauty of the introduction, which sets the reader in a proper state of mind for the stories that follow and which lingers with him ever afterwards if he reads a story here and there at random. But the state of mind produced by the setting here, in which a miscellaneous collection of rather disagreeable persons is becalmed in mid-Channel in an excursion steamer, by no means recalls the magic of the Tuscan garden. The stories vary greatly in quality, but none of them is entitled to be considered very seriously. The best would make pleasant patches in our magazines, and the worst would be bad anywhere. The jokes at the expense of German dullness in the "Professor's Tale" are made with neatness and point. The Stone House Affair is not a bad detective story. The Upper Room is a decadent effort of a somewhat antiquated kind, but it is not too ill-written. There is no reason why these stories should not have been both written and published. But the great name under which they are announced and the elaboration of their frame make them seem perhaps more insignificant than they really are.
THE REVOLT OF YOUTH. By Coralie Hobson. Werner Laurie. 6s. net.
The squalors of theatrical touring companies seem to be, and no doubt are, capable of indefinite exploitation by novelists. Readers who care to be mildly harrowed by these topics will find in this volume all the pabulum to which they have been accustomed in innumerable other books. But those who have no particular taste for this sort of thing beyond moderation will confine themselves to wondering in what the revolt of youth here consists and in what way they are expected to find it a moving performance. Louie breaks away from home, goes on the stage, is a failure, returns and marries her cousin. There is a suicide and a good deal of illicit love-making, and at the end the heroine behaves with conventionally noble unconventionality. But these things are wearisome if one has no special taste for them.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SOME DIVERSIONS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. By Edmund Gosse, C.B. Heinemann. 7s. 6d. net.
Diversions? In a sense they are all, they have always been, diversions. Mr. Gosse has never allowed the chains of the critical vocation to weigh heavily upon him. It has been consistently his especial characteristic that he has approached the most difficult problems in literature with undaunted courage and vivacity. Where others have sat down to the difficult siege of Donne or Swinburne with the pedantic long faces of writers determined not to flinch even though all their readers fall asleep during the fray, Mr. Gosse advances lightly, blows a pleasant blast on the trumpet of his familiar prose and topples the most obdurate walls over before him, without ever losing the least part of his dignity. This it is which makes his reputation one of the assets of modern English literature. He represents among us a school of critics of which the disciples in this country are by no means too numerous. During a long career he has found and continually practised the secret of being almost always sound and never dull, invariably vivacious, and hardly ever superficial. His critical essays have always the gay, untrammelled air, if not the frivolous substance, of pure diversions.