32 
Land & Water 
August 8, 19 1 8 
The Reader's Diary 
New Novels 
MK. GALSWORTHY seems, in his m\v yulaine 
of short stories, Five Tales (Heinemann, 
()s. net), to have risen a Httle out of the abyss 
into winch he fell in his last long novel. But 
the same touch of the theatrical appears ; 
and, at all events, for better or for worse, he has ceased to 
be tlie chief exponent of uncompromising naturalism in con- 
temporary English literature. It is not easy to say why 
this should have happened.' It has just happened. But 
all or most . of these tales were written for magazines, I- 
think. I remember seeing some of them there and being 
a little alarmed by the pictures which accompanied 
them. 
But, whatever the significance of this may be — lam not 
certain that it need have any — one thing is clear, namely, 
that Mr. Galsworthy has relinquished the attempt to be a 
tirst-rate artist. His earher books' and plays were not 
uniformly successful. They were often dull and cramped, 
written from a standpoint that made them difficult to read, 
difficult to respond to. But they had always a certain 
stringency of execution, they were written by a man who 
put really hard work into his conception and into his 
expression of it. These tales are much looser in fibre and 
they get their effects by more facile means. They are 
easier to shde through; but they do not leave so definite 
an impression on the mind as Mr. Galsworthy's more 
crabbed earlier work. 
i3ut all this should not bo taken as implying tliat these 
tales do not make interesting reading. The first of them is a 
".shocker" in which an eminent K.C. is plunged into embar- 
rassment by tlie fact that his ne'er-do-well brother has com- 
mitted murder of a rather sordid kind; The tale called 
The Juryman is an account of a "conversion,' or change 
of heart, in a smooth and dapper Httle business man, which 
fades unsatisfied into the light of common day. Neither of 
these is maintained quite at the temperature which the 
subjects demand. The best things in the book are two studies 
of old men. In the first, Sylvanus Heythorp, an aged 
financier,' wliosc creditors do not press him into bank- 
ruptcy because he allots to them nearly all the income he 
derives from director's fees, is concerned to make a settlement 
on the children of his illegitimate son, takes a secret com- 
mission for the purpose, and dines recklessly and dies When 
his crime is discovered. Here Mr. Galsworthy draws the 
failing, but indomitable, old man with a sure touch ; and in 
Phyllis, his granddaughter, he has made a very pretty little 
portrait, worthy to stand beside his eariier study of a young 
girl in Joy. In the other, Indian Summer of a Forsyte, the 
tranquil ending of a life is beautifully studied, and for a brief 
moment Mr. Galsworthy docs attain the "melting mood." 
Perhaps his ]x)wer of depicting old men and young girls will 
keep some of his work alive when the rest, strenuous or slack, 
has passed from memory. 
MV. E. F. Benson's new book, Vp and Down (Hutchinson, 
6s. net), provokes only the reflection that it is really not Mr. 
Benson's wi^/tVr to deal with the psychical and the other 
world or even to~write a diar^ of the w"ar as it appears to a 
non-combatant. He is much more at home with the passions 
and humours aroused in finding and furnishing a new house, 
with the daily' life of that enchanting Italian island, Alatri, 
and with the parrot who lost her power of synthetic reason- 
ing after an attack of brain-fever and observed suddenly : 
"Gott strafe Polly's head ! Gott save the King ! Gott save 
the Kaiser ! Gott scratch Polly's head ! " Mr. Benson does 
this sort of thing very well. i5ut it is a great pity that he 
should mix it up with long, not very original, and not very 
interesting meditations on psychical research.. It is even a 
greater pity that he should intersperse his gentle, ambling 
narrative with perfectly common-place summaries of the 
progress of the war. 
Mr. Arthur D. Howden Smith's Claymore ; a Story of the 
'45 (Skeftington, 6s. net), is not so bad as the first recorded 
remark of the hero: "With all due respect, my lord, I am 
not a fool, and, certcs, I am no longer a boy" would lead one 
to expect. It contains a great deal of fighting and adventures 
in the Highlands, and heroism and villainy in profusion. 
Oddly enough, the heroine, who dons the kilt and leads, her 
clan into action, behaves witli courtesy' to tlie hero tliroughout, 
and heaps liini early with honour instead of the insults and 
misunderstandings which would have been only natural 
(in a novel) from a young lady in her position. 
The Enthusiastic Professor 
VV'lien Sir Artimr yuiller-Couch was appointed to succeed 
Dr. Verrall as Edward VII. Professor of English Literature 
at Cambridge, it was fairly certain that he would infuse a 
new meaning into the ordinary reading of professorial duties. 
It was not guessed, however, even by the most far-seeing, 
that he would enter into the University with so much en- 
thusiasm, that he would direct it so wisely, or that he would 
achieve such good results as he has done. His second volume 
of lectures. Studies in Literature (Cambridge University 
Press, los. 6d. net), filled out with essays from other 
sources, shows in a very precise manner how he conceives 
his duties and gives good hope that from this centre of ardency 
an influence may spring which will liaxe a considera]>le effect 
on the next generation of English writers and critics. For 
to Sir Arthur, literature is a live tiling, not dead, an art, not 
a science, a thing for use in daily life, not an ornament to be 
kept on shelves behind glass doors. He has had sufficient 
courage to lecture on the poetry of Meredith and Hardy, 
as well as on that of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan. He finds 
himself able to deal with questions of the future and to 
recommend the practice of unrhymed lyric verse in English. 
He wishes the school of EngUsh literature over whicli he 
presides to be as modern and actual as possible ; and he 
asks the heretical question: "And after all, what does it 
matter to this large world in the long run if a tripos candidate 
should pronounce a mistaken judgment on the merits of 
Lascelles Abercrombie, John Masefield, or John Drink- 
water ? " It is true that his exuberance overcomes his caution 
and that not all of the theories he puts forward will bear 
close examination. His "sincere belief" that a great genius 
who lived somewhere on or about the Border is responsible 
for all the beauty of our ballad-poetry is a trifle fantastic, 
especially when one considers that the best ballads occur 
on the Continent, not only with the same story but also with 
the same form as in England. But this — if a fault at all — 
is a fault on the right side'; for there is nothing that has 
done more to give the word "professor" an evil connotation 
than, the ordinary professor's inability to move without a 
whole battery of tangible, though sometimes equally fantas- 
tically applied, evidence to prove the least of his points. 
And, unlike most professors, he returns again and again to 
the question of practice : 
I want [he says] indeed. Prose "in widest commonalty 
spread." I desire — to'*put it on merely practical grounds, 
using a fairly recent example — that among us we make 
it impossible to do again what our Admiralty did with the 
battle of Jutland, to win a victoiy at sea and lose it in a 
dispatch. And I use this illustration because many who 
will hardly be convinced that a thing is worth doing well 
for its own sake, may yet listen when you show them that 
to do it ill, inditterently, laxly, means piiblic damage. 
Tliere used to be a saying in the Fleet — and it should have 
reached the Admiralty — that "nigh-enough is the worst 
man in the ship." 
It was a good thing for Cambridge, perhaps for English 
letters at large, when Sir Arthur was appointed ; and in 
his printed lectures wc have only the first instalnieirt of tlie 
fruits of the appointment. 
Trade and Politics in the Far East 
Sir .Arthur would find, I am sure, in Mr. Frederic Coleman's 
The Far East Unveiled (Cassell, 7s. 6d. net) a text for another 
lecture ; for it is clumsily written, so. much so tJiat 
in some places it needs careful thought to discover what sort 
of impression the writer is seeking to produce. But it is 
to be commended as a very careful, conscientious and well- 
informed inquiry into the political and economic situation 
in the Far East during iqi6. Mr. Coleman was principally 
anxious to learn the intentions of Japan with regard to China 
and whether the much-quoted "Open door" in Manthuria 
was actually being maintained, and to this end he interviewed 
all the leading politicians and publicists, in both countries, 
on whom he could lay his hands. His eventual judgment, 
while not wholly favourable to the Japanese, exonerates 
them from all charges of having closed the Manchurian " door" 
in violation of their pledges. Those who wish to gain a 
sound and well-based view of the situation ill tlie Far East 
can hardly do better than pick their way tlirouglj Mr. Cole- 
man's clumsy, but instructive, pages. 
Petek BEll. 
