i8 
Land & Water 
April 25, 19 1 8 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Somm 
R 
Remnants 
EMNANTS" (by Desmond MacCarthy. Con- 
stable, 5s. net) is a title which is calculated to 
mislead. It has a savour of the depressed 
novel about it. We have got so used to these 
morose metaphors. Either, we suppose, the 
"remnants" will be odds and ends of unsuccessful people 
thrown up on some obscure beach by the sea of life, or else 
they will be the poor shreds of consolation with which some 
discontented man — or, more probably, woman — ^will content 
(damn these alternative pronouns of gender) hprself after 
twenty-five years of disillusionment with a husband who 
does his best, several deaths, several survivals, crippling 
poverty, embarrassing wealth, and the bitter disappointment 
of bringing up children who have turned into young men 
with round, red faces — all the experiences, in fact, with 
which contemporary novelists make their characters unhappy 
and bring their readers to the verge of suicide. But in this 
instance the title of the book has no such name or bitter 
significance. The author has gathered together a few essays 
and stories. They are various, and they are a selection from 
a large journalistic product ; and their modest author, 
evidently despairing of a really accurate descriptive title, 
has taken refuge in this. 
* Ik « * « * 
The volume contains seven short stories and "sketches," 
and sixteen essays on places, men, books, plays, and human 
habits. The stories are so good that one wishes there were 
more of them. The Brothers Brindle, which exposes to 
the gaze the tricks of picture dealers, might to advantage 
have been greatly lengthened, and The Snob Doctor contains 
a beautiful idea of which much more might have been made. 
"Perhaps," it begins, 
some of my readers also received a copy of the prospectus, 
which I found enclosed in a large envelope of superfine 
quality on my breakfast table the other morning. The 
drift of it was unusual. In this document, Mr. Ponde, 
M.A., of Harley Street, announced that his consulting 
hours were 10 to i and 3 to 5, and that between those hours 
he was at the service of anyone who wished to consult 
him about any uneasiness they might feel with regard to 
their social position. "It is not uncommon," the pros- 
pectus ran, "for those whose accomplishments, education, 
incomes, and good sense might be expected to render them 
immune from such uneasiness, to suffer intermittently, or 
even chronically, from distressing doubts as to their own 
claims to gentility, especially in the company of those who 
set store by such distinctions. Their trouble has been 
in most cases much aggravated by reserve, such matters 
being regarded as too delicate and invidious to be touched 
upon in conversation. For although the claims of the 
absent to be lady or gentleman, as the case may be, are 
often brightly discussed among their friends, the person 
concerned derives Uttle benefit from these discussions ; on 
his or her appearance the conversation is too often turned 
into other channels. On the other hand, free communica- 
tion on the part of the patient about his own sufferings 
and symptoms — wide experience has convinced Mr. Ponde 
is the first step towards healthy recovery. 
" Enclosed were a number of testimonials announcing com- 
plete recovery from fear of flunkeys, unintentional con- 
descension, unwilHng humility, chronic oblivion of unsuccess- 
ful relations, and cases of the most virulent compound 
snobbishness." We are taken to Mr. Ponde's consulting- 
room ; we see the man operating upon a fashionable preacher 
who has scourged his congregation for subtly snobbish 
reasons, an honest Labour leader alarmed by the flutter he 
has felt when driving with a Marchioness, etc.; and the 
author's sly observation is as accurate as his manner is 
arch and delicate. But the best of this group is A Hermit's 
Day, which conducts us from morning to night through a 
typical section of the aged Voltaire's life at Femey. The 
introductory paragraph is sure, firm, and arouses expect- 
ancy at once : 
Blue damask curtains were drawn across the' windows, 
but one long slit of daylight made every shadowy object in 
the room discernible : a cold white pyramidal stove opf)osite 
the marble fireplace, the portraits and the magnificent 
mirror on the walls, five writing-tables piled with neat 
papers, and under its canopy of blue silk the low, plain 
bed, with a deep cleft in the swelling pillow. Absolute 
stillness reigned. 
In a few pages the whole character of the philosopher and 
his odd menage are painted : the crowd of subsidiary people 
are touched in with subtle strokes, and perfect art is shown 
in the selection of incidents to draw out Voltaire's leading 
traits. It is not for everybody ; nor is the book as a whole. 
But anyone who is already familiar with Voltaire will get a 
rich and a repeated pleasure out of it. 
i * * * « * 
The literary and dramatic essays are rather too miscel- 
laneous, and one or two of them are too scrappy, but they 
are so sane and persuasive that one can finish none of them 
without one's views having suffered some slight modification. 
Why is it that they nevertheless leave us — most of them — 
with a feeling of dissatisfaction ? 
****** 
Mr. MacCarthy has qualities which should put him among 
the best occasional essayists. His interests and his sym- 
pathies are universal and his tastes catholic. He is not one 
of those critics who are so impressionable and ductile that 
they take the colour of the last powerful book they read 
or^the last emphatic man they met. He has an attitude ; 
his ideas about morals and manners are personal and fixed. 
You cannot contrast one essay with another and say, "Here 
he is sceptical," "Here he believes," "Here passion and here 
reason is in command of him." He is certain about his 
few certainties and his uncertainties ; his standards and his 
affections do not vary ; he preserves his criteria and his 
balance. But his own position is always rather hinted at 
and implied than stated, and he is not so preoccupied with 
it as to be unable to give the fullest measure of understanding 
to men of other types and with other opinions. He has a 
wide knowledge of books and a love of fine writing ; but he 
is never in the least bookish. Books are only one element in 
the glittering phantasmagoria of life; and his principal interest 
is not art, not inanimate nature, though he writes vividly 
and intimately of both, but the heart and mind of man, 
particularly in their more secret and less observed workings. 
His criticism is the fruit of long experience and reflection, 
an eye quick to seize appearances and quick to pierce them, 
a brain to which make-believe and self-deception are not merely 
wrong, but also boring. In a casual way and without parade, 
he will bring out — whether he is discussing the speeches of 
a politician or the grimaces of a clown — some truth about 
everybody's inner life which one has never heard stated 
before. He has an instrument exactly suited to him, a 
vocabulary full of fine shades, an easy, flexible style, capable 
both of fluent eloquence and colloquial abruptness. But 
he works under a very great handicap. 
It is a handicap that must in this age oppress every essayist 
of his curious, sagacious, leisurely, discursive kind. That 
handicap is the nature of what the literary agents would call 
the market for serial rights. A century ago, when Lamb 
and Hazlitt wrote their essays ; less than a century ago, 
when Macaulay, Bagehot, and Matthew Arnold wrote their 
essays on' criticism, the quarterly and monthly reviews 
dominated the critical world. They had the reputations, 
they had the audiences; they usually had the funds ; and 
their daily and weekly rivals offered them Uttle rivalry. 
The man who wrote for them — and the essayist got an 
opening nowhere else — was allowed plenty of elbow-room ; 
four thousand words he regarded as quite a moderate allow- 
ance, and he ran to much greater lengths when he chose. 
In our own day, the centre of interest and of influence has 
shifted to the literary weeklies and some of the dailies. 
Almost all the work of our best modern essayists — Mr. 
Chesterton, Mr. Belloc, Mr. Lynd, Mr. Lucas — has originally 
been done either for weekHes wliich cannot do with more 
than two thousand words at a time or daihes which permit 
anything between twelve and eighteen hundred words. A 
great deal of very fine work has been done within these 
limitations. They restrict some writers less than others. 
They put a premium on rapid effects, on impressionism, 
on the picturesque paragraph, and the brilliant phrase, and 
they bear most hardly on the critics of literature who wish 
to exhibit a subject in all its aspects, and the meditative 
man who has a full mind and an undemonstrative manner. 
The feeling one so often has with modern essayists — the 
feeling of disappointment that they have come to a stop 
just when we are beginning to be touched or excited — is 
especially acute when the essa5dsts are of this critical type, 
and one feels the defect of length, particularly with Mr. 
MacCarthy, who gives the impression that he could say 
ten times more on a subject than he actually has done. 
