The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Briefer Mention (November 1923)

BRIEFER MENTION

Captures, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 305 pages; Scribner: $2) opens with what is easily the most important story in the volume—A Feud. It is a beautifully balanced tale, rich with the atmosphere of the English countryside and the emotional implications so largely depending thereon. In a sense complementary to this is The Man Who Kept His Form, apotheosizing the quiet, triumphant changelessness of the English aristocrat despite apparent failure. The sketches following these two stories, although gleaming with the fine, reserved words that have power to convey subtle insights, are disconcertingly slight and by-the-way. Galsworthy emphasizes the artificiality of the form he so competently, and sometimes exquisitely, masters.

 

Grey Wethers, by V. Sackville-West (12mo, 328 pages; Doran: $2) has its origin and validity in the setting. The author has tried to symbolize the English downs by typifying their outstanding moods in the characters, their grandeur and immutability in the action of her story. Although the stern freedom that is their keynote is excessively romanticized, a greyly glamorous generalization has been effected; but neither the downs nor their personification have been arrested in any specific, distinctive dramatization. Miss Sackville-West has done well to limit her subject matter more vigorously than in Challenge; her development of it has gained correspondingly in directness and a well-contained richness.

 

Weird Tales, by E. T. W. Hoffmann, translated from the German by J. T. Bealby (12mo, 344 pages; Scribner: $2.50). "But wonderful are the doings of Accident!" the author is moved to exclaim in one of his stories, while elsewhere a character finds that "accident came to his rescue." With this rather lenient attitude towards his craft, Hoffmann could let his parlour fantasy play about a world of people who, while not subtle enough figures to compel interest in their characters, usually possess sufficiently marked attributes to interest us in their welfare. Hoffmann's "weirdness," however, is a little too much like the dungeon scene in one-night-stand opera, where the massive canvas rocks sway slightly as the curtain rises. Much more authentic is the appeal of an occasional passage which reconstructs the somewhat ceremonious but amiable times in which the author lived and for which his work was best adapted.

 

Malice, by Pierre MacOrlan (16mo, 242 pages; G. Crés: Paris). There is a golem, a devil in shape of an old Jew, a young man who trades his soul for a rope to hang himself: in short, all the machinery of German romantic novels of the early nineteenth century, but employed ironically against the strictly modern background of the city of Mainz in 1922. Malice has the air of being an Expressionist poster to advertise the spectacle of moral decay, naively vicious, but not unaesthetic, which is one side only of Germany since the war.

 

Dobachi, by John Ayscough (12mo, 284 pages; Macmillan: $2). Prevailing tendencies in fiction have not bothered Mr Ayscough; his novel is about as old-fashioned as a felt boot, and put together with approximately the same degree of grace. The narrative, with its setting a New England village of Cornish puritans, fails to come to life under the prodding of a laborious pen; the author accepts defeat at the hands of his heroine with only two-thirds of the book written and sighs: "All this happened long before I was born: no record of her suspicions has been handed down, and I do not choose to guess at her feelings in the matter." Mr Ayscough, it appears, is a novelist who takes no liberties.

 

Bread, by Charles Gilman Norris (12mo, 511 pages; Dutton: $2) may be edible, but it is neither nutritious nor palatable. The author is an indiscriminatingly voluble slave of the realistic school with no suspicion that by showing the romance of the commonplace the commonplace itself may be revealed. He has dedicated an egregiously drab book to the proposition that existence is a bad business. In a style as formless as an amoeba he emulates the specious exactitude of Sinclair Lewis and the mania of Upton Sinclair for persecuting maladjustments. His report bears the same distortive resemblance to life that stenographic symbols have to the words they stand for.

 

An Outlaw's Diary: Revolution, by Cecile Tormay (8vo, 291 pages; McBride: $3) is a record of a patrician's reactions to the subversion of the old order which took place in Hungary in 1918. Patriotism and conservatism are the author's fetishes. There is no attempt at an unbiased viewpoint in the book, and too little discrimination between fact and hearsay. The unrelieved extravagance of emotions at times arouses the reader's impatience, until he reasons that probably it was in just proportion to the tumultuous terrors of the time. And, since scepticism of the underlying sincerity is inadmissible, he cannot shut out the hysterical cry of impassioned resentment and cumulative despair.

 

The Ancient Beautiful Things, by Fannie Stearns Davis (12mo, 82 pages; Macmillan: $1). The author paints upon a narrow canvas, and is at her best when picturing the fireside and the cradle; but, within her limited fields, she writes with a directness and a genuineness of emotion. The book is impressive because the impulse behind it is obviously authentic.

 

The Dream and Other Poems, by John Masefield (12mo, 63 pages; Macmillan: $1.25). An old mood many times expressed in earlier poems runs through Masefield's new book. The old richness and mellowness are here too, but the poems seem slighter than those of the former volumes, and the metre is so unvaried and so balanced as to be very slightly soporific. Vision and interpretation have taken on a more sombre cast, but for all that Masefield has little to fear in competition with any other poet among either the older or the younger Georgians. It is only his own earlier works with which this new volume does not bear comparison.

 

The Ballad of St Barbara and Other Verses, by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (12mo, 85 pages; Putnams: $2.50) prove that the author has never captivated that subtle thing of melody and magic whose name is poetry. The melody, indeed, he has mastered, but he has none of the magic of the Muse; something prosaic and sodden weighs down the very spirit of his book; and, in spite of all Mr Chesterton's apt rhymes and graceful rhythms, one fails to find any trace of that graphic imagery or of that emotional or imaginative fervour for which a poem may be memorable.

 

The Sun Chaser, by Jeanette Marks (12mo, 119 pages; Stewart Kidd: $1.75). This play is marked by careful character delineations and by a vague and poetic symbolism that at times seems in danger of losing itself in skeins of imagination, but that for the most part is employed with subtlety and restraint. Occasionally the author appears to be tiptoeing on the verge of melodrama, but she never lets herself quite fall beyond the verge. Her work on the whole is shadow-haunted, but impressive.

 

Thirteen Worthies, by Llewellyn Powys (16mo, 221 pages; American Library Service: $1.75) is a pleasant echo of the virile voices of Chaucer, Bunyan, William Barnes, Hardy, and other men intimate with the soil, strong and whole-hearted in piety or gaiety. Simple, "earth-bound" spirits they seem to Mr Powys; he disregards the complexities implicit in the very existence of their works. The essays in their unpretentiousness and slimness seem shy; and would seem youthful, but for a quality of gentle melancholy. The author too modestly disavows original thoughts by the frequent use of quotations, but he gives character to names lodged away from every-day memory, and his genuine joy in his subjects is shared by the reader.

 

Roman Pictures, by Percy Lubbock (12mo, 221 pages; Scribner: $3) is in every sense an exquisite performance—the work of a true stylist to whom the English language is still a temple of matchless masonry, inviting the hand of the craftsman decorator. There is not a careless phrase in the book; the pattern is as intricate as it is beautiful. In mood, these reminiscences have the same tone which was to be found in Earlham, but here there is greater richness, a more abundant ease, and a touch of high humour. Altogether, an accomplishment which the author—as an enlightened disciple—might lay before Henry James and be confident of the verdict.

 

Some Makers of American Literature, by William Lyon Phelps (12mo, 187 pages; Marshall Jones: $2.50). From this series of lectures, delivered at Dartmouth, one learns that Emerson was an "ardent American," that Mark Twain was "the great American Democrat," that Hawthorne was "a glory to American literature," and as for Jonathan and Benjamin Franklin—"if we could take the best in both, and unite the combination in one person, we should have the ideal American." The lectures must have been delivered from a flag-draped rostrum, or was there a chautauqua at Hanover?

 

Gods of Modern Grub Street, by A. St John Adcock, with thirty-two portraits after photographs by E. O. Hoppé (12mo, 326 pages; Stokes: $2.50) is a collection of notes documenting Mr Hoppé's photographs. Mr Adcock furnishes the bones of biography, with some timid comments—this book seems better than that, or a certain book is about this or that; but he fails to possess, or submerges, any particular appetites in literature. His writing lacks personality; and he is the perfect "book in breeches." Mr Hoppé's portraits are very plain and public—an identifiable mask and conventional posing of hands and pipe in a moderate murk. Nevertheless certain faces, such as Hardy's or Hilaire Belloc's, are like to endure as he has recorded them. It is pleasant to see Mr E. Phillips Oppenheim's mild proletariat face, not unlike the late John Bunny's, Mr McKenna's ideal aristocracy, and Miss Kaye-Smith's acrid sunniness. But in this case the quality of godliness is success; and the book would have more interest if they had sought certain distinguished faces which the great publishers have not yet made as trite as the Smith Brothers'.

 

Men of Letters, by Dixon Scott, with an Introduction by Max Beerbohm (12mo, 313 pages; Doran: $3). England's long alienation from constructive movements in the other arts has intensified a remarkable impure delight in literature, in which a dim sense of design and formal beauty became inextricably confused with accidental and social interests. That the critic dominated the reader and not the writer is indicated by the fact that a school of ornate romantic critics preceded a group of novels strictly designed, of an intricate cold carved quality, which irritated and dismayed the unprepared public. The late Mr Dixon Scott says that "one of the chief joys of criticism is the joy of detection—an actual hounding-down of a live human being," with no suspicion that this pleasure ought to be somewhat illicit. His comments are sensitive and shapely, but mostly a little beside the point. True critical acumen, which reproduces in diagram the process of creation, is a little overlaid by the irrelevant things he saw in his subject. That he possessed it is clear in the Whitman note. He observed Whitman's all but secure position between poetical rhetoric and exact creation; and wrote of the poignance of his particular in sharp relief against the universal, his image against a primitive atmosphere, as in Oriental verse.

 

Harmonism and Conscious Evolution, by Sir Charles Walston (12mo, 463 pages; Macmillan: $6). The sequel to the dictum that "everything flows" is the discovery of the unchanging principle which underlies this flow. Sir Charles Walston, then, is writing the sequel to pragmatism when he attempts to bring the emphasis on the free creative will back to some principle underlying this will. And he sees what the pragmatists have missed: that the creative will involves first of all an aesthetic principle rather than an ethical one. But we do wish that this really vital formulation of aesthetic priority had permeated the author's style more deeply, so that his plea for beauty in living might have been more a thing of beauty in itself.