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LAND & WATER 
September 20, 1917 
Novels of the Autumn 
YEARS ago this reviewer was a temporary inmate 
of a hospital in a Western city of America. Among 
liis fellow-patients was a man from Arkansas, of a 
considerable power of verbal expression. His 
favourite expletive was "Jesus H. Christ." But the Arkansas 
man was of no use with his ix^i, and having letters to write 
home, the reviewer constituted himself his amanuensis. In 
remuneration he only asked the American to cease using 
the Sacred Name. " Name ? " exclaimed the son of 
Arkansas ; " Jesus H. Christ ! • What name ? " The 
reviewer discovered he was in the presence of a human 
being totally ignorant of the Gospel story, to whom the 
Sacred Name was merely a mellifluous ejaculation. It seems , 
to have been much the same with Mr. Wells. Until two 
or three years ago God appears to have represented to him 
nothing but a monosyllabic cuss-word. Then someone 
mnst have e.xplained that behind the woid was a Personality, 
a Living Power. This has so " intrigued " him (" intrigued ' 
we beli-ve to be le mot jiisle) that he cannot write enough 
on the subject. We liave had (lod the Invisible King by 
Wells the Incomprehensible Creature, and now we are given 
The Soul of a Bishop (Cassells, 5s. net), \Vhich might almost 
be called The Mind of a Novelist, for it yields curious insights 
into the innermost thought of the author. Among otlivr 
things we discover that Mr. WvUs belongs to that not incon- 
siderable class of the community which judges the social 
status of the individual by the size of the house lived in, for- 
getting, as do all those" who subscribe to this suburban 
snobbery, the well-known couplet of Dick Lovelace : 
Stone walls do not a household make 
Nor cubic feet a home. 
The younger daughters of the Bishop of Princhester certainly 
scored ; for when he, having jettisoned apron and shovel 
hat, retired to Pembury Road, they were sent to 
Notting Hill High School, which is perhaps the oldest and 
certainly one of the best public schools for girls in the country. 
* . * * * * 
If the only thing in Mr. Wells's new book -ivas hisjejune and 
flatfooted discussions of tiie Deity, it might well be passed 
over., for these things irritate a few and bore many ; and 
even those who take pleasure in them, do it for some secondary 
reasbn. For instance, it is amusing to find the eagerness with 
which certain reviewers of a different faith are using Mr. 
Wells's latest as a new stick with which to hammer the 
Church of England. But with The Soul of the Bishop, as with 
others of Mr. Wells's recent works, a little leaven leaveneth 
the whole lump. It was certainly so both with Mr. Britling 
and The Imnsible King. The leaven in this case is a " precious 
fluid," " the moet golden of licpiids," a sort of Great Easton 
syrop which sends " a joyous- tingling throughout the body " 
and promotes visions. Mr. Wells benefits more from it than 
the Bishop, and his readers benefit the most. Once the 
Great Easton syrop works — it is a familiar formula — we 
have the old Wells, the imaginative writer, the poet, who 
throws reality to the winds, sacrifices verisimilitude, and 
who, througli vivid imagery and a fine art of word painting, 
conveys an impression which is outside the scope of ordinary 
language. His success is splendid. We may not like the 
Bishop of Princhester, we iriay regard him as weak, un- 
balanced, half-educated, but once the tingling begins and 
the vision opens, we see him struggling in an apocalyptic 
fit, honestly and sincerely endeavouring to realise the truth 
he believes to lie within him. While the drug is in operation 
the Bishop is no mean modern Hamlet, as feeble as mortal 
man must always be, bowed down beneath " the heavy and 
vs-eary weight of all this unintelligible world." 1 Mr. Wells, 
the theologian, moves Us to mockery, but for Mr. Wells, the 
imaginative writer, we have a most wholehearted admira- 
tion. Weak and ineffectual as The Soul of the Bishop, re- 
garded as a whole, must be pronounced, we believe it contains 
certain passages that will in time rank among the master- 
pneces of this prolific writer. 
Wanted a TorloiseshcU, by Peter BUmdell (John Lane, 5s. 
net) is a comedy of the Straits Settlements, of the type which 
this author has made peculiarly his own, but there is missing 
from it the usual Eurasian, whose place in this case is taken 
by a fat and particularly offensive Swedish gentleman. The 
plot of the story is mainly developed on the difficulty of 
obtaining a tortoiseshell torn cat — a real tortoiseshell, and 
a worthy successor to the cats venerated in ancient Egypt. 
Cats chased, cats dyed, cats stolen and cats recovered, give 
plenty of scope for action, of which the author takes full 
advantage. The local colour is as convincing as ever, the 
disreputable Scot, McQuat, is as disturbing as ever, and tha 
story as a whole is as joyous a ]>roduction as its predecessorsj 
a book with which to forget about events for an hour or two") 
and be genuinely amused. 
Smugglers, lost heirs, and a distinct flavour of the early 
nineteenth century, are the principal characteristics of The 
Weird 0' the Pool, by Alexander Stuart (John Murray, 5s. 
net), though there are gipsy women with tlie power of fore- 
telling the future, a villain or two of the very deepest dye, 
' and the inevitable love interest of such a story, as well. 
The plot is a complicated one, of the kind that Wilkie Collins 
would have delighted in, and the saving grace of humour, 
which the author possesses to a very large degree, redeems 
the book from the commonplace and adds point to what is, 
as a matter of fact, a very good story. Jimmy Bogle, reputed 
half-witted, bi\t in reality as brainy as the very clever villain 
himself, cracks jokes in north-country dialect from time to 
time, and the jokes are good, having in them a savour of that 
hard-headed appraisement of life which is characteristic of 
the north-countryman. A good knowledge of woodland 
things and ways, and the gift of terse, vivid description, stamp 
the work, and certain verses, attributed to Jimmy Bogle — 
who could both scare crows and " make pottery," as he 
called poetry — help to enfiven it. We hope to see more of 
Mr. Stuart's work, for this,. presumably a first novel, is one of 
more than usual promise. 
It is fairly safe to say that when an American sets out to dc 
a thing, he does it pretty thoroughly, and n'/«g.s of Danger 
a romance by Arthur A. Nelson (McBride, Nast, ,6s.), is a 
good instance of this. The author has taken the Haggard 
type of Central African plot, and packed it so full of incident 
that there is a thrill to every page ; not much fine writing, 
for there is no room for it, but fights galore, and a yarn of a 
party of Norsemen who, in old time, came exploring and 
settled in the unknown wilds, there to be found by adven- 
turers who brought with them a machine gun or two, and 
other scientific implements which, of course, gave them a 
decided advantage over their hosts in the wilderness. A 
certain immaturity of construction is evident here and there — 
it is as if the author had changed his mind while writing, 
for he does not make the most of some, of his incidents, but 
lets others overshadow them, so that in one or two cases 
the reader is irritated by blind trails. But it is safe to say 
that, if this book is handed to the average school-boy, it will 
be diftlcult to get the boy to bed at the proper time, until he 
has finislied it. It is, of course, sheer melodrama, and very 
impossible, if one stops to think ; but, in spite of its defects, 
it is so engagingly written that one does not stop to think 
until the drama of the red king and his mysterious city is 
fully played out. In that fact is recommendation enough. 
* * * * * 
The Brown Brelhcrn, Patrick MacGill's latest book (Herbert 
Jenkins, 6s. net), concerns certain men in khaki — thre£ pri- 
vates and a sergeant of the London Irish, to be precise — who 
went through certain parts of the big defensive that preceded 
the big offensive of the Somme. The author writes of Vimy, 
of Souchez, of life behind the lines, and he weaves into this 
record of war a little love story between one of the London 
Irish and a French " Fifi," a romance with a happy ending, in 
spite of the war. But the book lacks the power of Mr. MacGill's 
earlier studies of battle ; it is as monotonous as the trenches 
themselves, and not alwaj'S convincing. W'e have read about 
these three soldiers and the sergeant so many times, and many 
of rs know the real words of the trench songs which Mr. 
MacGill has bowdlerised so carefuUj-. It is an average war 
stot^', but its author can and ought to do better work. 
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