him at times into excessive praise of his subjects, especially the ladies, and so to apparent disparagement of his people at home. For my part I vastly prefer the Irish, men, women and children, in Ireland to all or any of their relatives and friends elsewhere; for when they leave their island their humour runs to seed and loses that detachment and delicacy which constitute its unique charm. That Mr. Birmingham, however, was not nearly long enough abroad to suffer this deterioration, must be patent to all who linger over this happy book.
If Miss Jessie Pope receives her just reward, she will soon have to put a notice in the daily papers to the effect that she is grateful for kind enquiries, but is unable at present to answer them. For I think that any enterprising boy who reads The Shy Age (Grant Richards) will forthwith make it his business to find out the name of the school at which Jack Venables amused himself, and that even if unavoidaule circumstances prevent him from going there he will, at any rate, remain disgruntled until he can place his finger upon it on the map. After reading these tales of school and holiday life, I can only say that the school which harboured me must have been a dull place, and that I should now like to return there for a term at least—I doubt if I should be allowed to stay longer—and liven things up. Miss Pope starts with one great advantage over men who write of boys' schools because the critics cannot say that her work is autobiographical, and then proceed to "recognise" most of her characters. That is the terror lurking by day and night for any man who dares to write a school-tale. On the other hand, although Miss Pope has fitted herself remarkably well into the skin of Jack Venables, who tells these stories but is not (thank goodness) the hero of most of them, she has not been able entirely to avoid what I must call Papal touches. For instance, I do not believe that a boy of Jack's age and character would use the word "feasible," and a special society would have to be started for the prevention of cruelty to any boy who ventured to talk of his "aunties." On the whole, however, she has a fine understanding of boy-nature, and if there are some improbabilities in these ingenious stories, she is armed with the crushing retort that the chief characteristic of any properly equipped boy is his improbability.
Possibly owing to some personal disinclination towards violent bodily exertion on the part of his creator, Father Brown, the criminal investigator of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's fancy, is not a fellow of panther-like physique. For him no sudden pouncing on the frayed carpet-edge, or the broken collar-stud dyed with gore. He carries no lens and no revolver. Flashes of psychological insight are more to him than a meticulous examination of the window-sill. When the motive is instantly transparent, why bother about the murderer's boots? In the circumstances it is perhaps fortunate for the reverend sleuth that he nearly always happens to be in either at the death or immediately after it, instead of being summoned a day or two later when the grotesque circumstances of the crime have baffled the panting ingenuity of Scotland Yard. You find him now in this part of England, and now in that, now in America, and now in Italy. He is, in fact, a hedge-priest and has not even a cure of souls in Baker Street. But wherever he goes with his flapping hat and his umbrella he chances on some fantasy of guilt. Yet any pangs we may feel for the absence of the familiar setting—the pale-faced butler in the guarded dining-room of the country-house and the staggered minions of the local constabulary—are assuaged by the brilliant narrative manner in which The Wisdom of Father Brown (Cassell) is set forth. Here is the paradoxical world of Mr. Chesterton's imagination described in his own verbiage and proved by actual and grisly events. In that starry dream of a detective story which I sometimes have, where sleuth-hounds are pattering along the Milky Way and pursue at last the Great Bear to his den, Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes, the one spectacled, the other lynx-eyed, are following the prey in leash.
Should you, among wild by-ways of Donegal or Connemara, meet a procession composed of Patsy McCann the Tinker and the Ass and Mary with Finaun the Archangel, Caeltia the Seraph, Art the Cherub, Eileen ni Cooley (a savage lady of easy morals), Billy the Music, the Seraph Cuchulain and Brien O'Brien, a lost soul who had a threepenny-bit stolen on him by Cuchulain that same, you would guess there's only one living man could be behind it—to wit James Stephens, Crock-of-Gold Stephens. Fantastic things indeed happen in The Demi-Gods (Macmillan), which is a kind of inspired nightmare, a sort of Chestertonian inconsequence done into Gaelic, a little less violent and with a little less malt, but even less coherent. At the risk of being reckoned among the egregiously imperceptive I would ask Mr. Stephens solemnly whether he is not in danger of letting his fancy take bit between teeth and land him in some bog of sheer literary chaos. The most distant of the futurists notwithstanding, there must be some rules to the game or you don't get your work of art. When those modern wizards of the halls set themselves to a piece of bizarre juggling, say, with a string of pearls, a dumb-bell and a rose-petal, they do toss and catch—don't merely let everything just drop. Mr. Stephens will know what I mean without caring overmuch. There's something in it all the same. Anyway, there really are in The Demi-Gods delicate shy pearls and gleams of the authentic gold of the original Crock. And after all it wasn't written for middle-aged gentlemen of the Saxon tribe.
German spies taking lessons from conjurer in the art of concealing pigeons.
Another Impending Apology.
"The Shipton family were too well known for anything to be said in their praise."—Buxton Advertiser.
