Officer (on rounds near revolving light). "Anything to report?"
Sentry. "No, Sir; there's no muckle ta riporet; but yon folks hae been havin' a heap o' trouble wi' their licht; it's gone oot twenty times in the last oor."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Stevenson, in one of his Fables, imagines a court presided over by the Great White Magistrate. It was a very brief session, and the novelist did not again use the idea. Mr. Hugh Carton, whose name, we are informed by the wrapper of the book, that new and most trustworthy medium of communication between the candid publisher (unwilling that merit should shine unobserved) and the hesitating purchaser (who needs only the truth to send his hand to his purse) is a pseudonym covering the identity of "one of the leading clerics of our day," has however made a whole book of it. In The Grand Assize (Heinemann) Mr. Carton imagines a Day of Judgment, on which the careers and influences of a number of social types are weighed and punishment inflicted—for all are guilty. The Plutocrat, the Daughter of Joy, the Bookmaker, the Party Politician, the Musical Comedy entrepreneur, the Agitator, even the Cleric (although not, I am sure, he of the wrapper) are called to justice. Everything for and against them is then said, either by themselves or the advocate, and sentence is passed. The result is a book curiously rich in sympathy, fearless and fine, and provocative of much thought. That it is in essence a tract is nothing against it; for many of the best novels belong to that genus, and Hogarth, of whom now and then the reader is forced to think, was a tractarian to the core. I take off my hat to "Hugh Carton" and wish that more parsons were as humane and understanding as he.
Mr. Algernon Blackwood seems as a writer to possess two quite distinct literary methods. There is his style high-fantastical, which at its best touches a kind of fairylike inspiration, unique and charming—the style, for example, of Jimbo. Then, on a lower plane, there is the frankly bogie creepiness of John Silence. Between the two he has created a position for himself, half trickster, half wizard, that none else in modern literature could fill. His new book, Incredible Adventures (Macmillan), is a combination of both methods. Four of the five adventures are of the mystically gruesome kind, removed however from being commonplace ghost-stories by a certain dignity of conception. It is to be admitted that but for this dignity two at least would fall into some peril of bathos. Take the first, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, in which a young tutor, bear-leading a spiritless scion of nobility through Europe, brings his bored charge to a strange mountain village where the inhabitants worship the forces of fire and wind. If you know Mr. Blackwood's work, as you surely do, I need not detail to you what happens. Told as he tells it, at considerable, even undue, length, but with a wonderful sense of the mysterious, of the feeling of the wind-swept mountain and its roaring fires, the thing is undeniably impressive. But in other less expert hands it would become ludicrous. There is one tale of finer texture than the others. It is called Wayfarers, and is a quite beautiful little fantasy on the old theme that love is longer than life. This is what Mr. Blackwood can do to perfection. It redeems a volume that, for all its originality, does not otherwise display his art quite at its best.
Antarctic Adventure (Fisher Unwin), by Raymond E. Priestley, tells the story of Scott's Northern party. That party, as you probably remember, spent an unexpected Winter underground, owing to the failure of the ship to
