August 29, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
The Reader's Diary 
15 
Recent Novels 
ROMAN'CES about the future arc very nearly the 
most dangerous form of literature that any man 
can take up — more particularly if he attempts a 
delineation of the sort of future he would like to 
live in. There are few things more self-revealing 
than a Utopia, few things more bleak and depressing than 
some one else's Utopia ; and the mechanical difficulties of 
getting your imaginary state of affairs explained to the 
reader are so great that only one really effective device for 
it has yet been discovered. This is by some invention, no 
matter how fantastic, to introduce into your story a stranger 
so completely ignorant of the world you wish to describe 
that things have to be made plain to him in the plainest 
way ; and it is a great pity that Mr. Oliver Onions has not 
seen fit to adopt this method in his romance of reconstruction. 
The New Moon (Hodder & Stoughton, 6s. net). He has 
chosen, instead, to make his hero — the lens, as it were, through 
which the reader looks at the new world — a soldier who 
fought through the war and took part in the process of recon- 
struction. -Nevertheless, he makes his soldier, and the 
reconstructed \'oung woman who serves as heroine, so 
ignorant that many things have to be explained to them, 
not in the clipped, allusive way, in which to-day one man 
might explain the working of trade unionism to another, 
not as an elaboration of common knowledge, but as a 
historian would set down all the facts for the benefit of 
posteritj'. But it should not be necessary, for example, 
for anyone to explain to the heroine that domestic servants 
have been largely superseded by trained and certificated 
"domestic managers" whose professional status is recognised 
and respected by their employers. She would have heard 
something about this, even though she did live in the country. 
Apart from this mechanical defect, the book is clever and 
interesting, as Mr. Onions' work always has been. He 
exhibits a regenerated state in wlfich many mistakes are 
rectified, and all — save a' few vulgar munitions millionaires 
and such — are concerned to serve the common interest by 
increasing the productive power of the country and paying 
off the National Debt as rapidly as possible. Mr. Onions' 
mind has always been a little hard ; but it is still something 
of a shock to find him so devoted to efficiency, to output, 
as he appears here. His vision of an England in 
which everything — except certainly quality — is sub- 
ordinated to quantity of production is not particularly 
alluring. 
Mr. Guy Thome's Lucky Mr. Loder (Ward, Lock, 5s. net) 
may usefully serve to point the moral that no reader ought 
to examine a "shocker" too closely. If it be read lightly, 
in the spirit in which it is written, it rattles gaily along with 
plenty of interest, enough deaths, and just the right amount 
of incident. But if the reader is so foolish as to allow his 
critical spirit to be roused, he begins to ask why Mr. Loder's 
assistance was so necessary in the great enterprise of restoring 
the rightful emperor of China to his throne that Molly Braiidon 
had to masquerade at Oxford as a barmaid in order to select 
him for the business. It is true that he conveyed a corpse 
from London to Exeter by way of preparing for Constantine 
Brandon's escape from prison. But surely Brandon's friends, 
who were so resourceful that they communicated with him 
by bursts of machine-gun fire in code, and so thorough that 
they provided his refuge on the moor with a telephone and 
periscope — surely they could have found an assistant in 
some other way, and surely they would have extended him 
a little further when they had found him. But this is hyper- 
criticism ; and it ought not to occur to any reader who takes 
the book on a long railway journey. 
A Romance of the Western Front, by Gabrielle Vassal 
(Heinemann, 6s. net), is slightly puzzling, because it has 
all the air of being a French novel, though there is no sign 
of its having been translated. But I doubt whether this 
tale of the English wife of an American whose intrigue with 
a French soldier takes her constantly into the war-zone 
would, be much more interesting in French. The characters 
are not sympathetic, and the story lacks point. 
Mr. Squire's Poems r 
In the preface to his Poems : First Series (Seeker, 6s. net), 
Mr. Squire remarks that "under Providence, other (and, 
let us hope, superior) collections will follow" ; and the fact 
that the volume contains a number of new and very good 
pieces which have not previously been published in book 
form lends a certain weight to the anticipation. It is possible, 
therefore, to regard the book without too much finality, 
and to attempt an estimate of its value without being dis- 
couraged if we cannot satisfactorily explain what the author 
has, perhaps, not yet fully revealed. The total impression 
that the collection makes is that of a poet whose principal 
instrument for conveying emotion is that of rhythm. I do 
not mean that these poems make merely a pleasant or an 
interesting noise in the ear ; but I do mean that they appeal 
first by their cadences, and that rhythm is the cutting edge 
behind which the bulk of what Mr. Squire has to say enters 
the mind. And it is therefore of importance to find that 
in his latest work he is capable of the delicate melody of 
the exquisite Song, of which one verse may be quoted : 
Eyes like flowers and falling liair 
Seldom seen, nor ever long. 
Then I did not know you were 
Destin'ed subject for a song : 
Sharing your unconsciousness 
Of your double loveliness. 
Unaware )iow fair you were, 
Peaceful eyes and shadowy hair. 
That is at once sweeter, more supple, and more normal 
than anything which Mr. Squire has previously achieved. 
He writes usually in a rather distant and austere spirit, 
and his earlier rhythmical successes were of the kind that is 
exhibited in The Ship : 
There was no song nor shout of joy 
Nor beam of moon or sun. 
When she came back from the voyage 
Long ago begun ; 
But twilight on the waters 
Was quiet and grey, 
And she glided steady, steady and pensive, , 
Over the open bay. 
Here, as in the mysterious and fantastic Lily of Malud, 
a poem already well known, and in The Stronghold : 
Quieter thkn any twilight 
Shed over earth's last deserts. 
Quiet and vast and shadowless 
, Is that unfounded keep. 
Higher than the roof of the night's high chamber. 
Deep as the shaft of sleep. 
the strange rhythm suits itself to a mood which is outside 
normal experience. The Song indicates that, to his more 
difficult adventures in distant and austere regions of the 
spirit, Mr. Squire has added a capacity for interpreting normal 
things. This impression is strengthened by Rivers a 
piece which appeared in these pages, where a procession of 
extraordinarily vivid pictures is conveyed by a subtle 
rhythmical mould, capable of almost infinite variation and 
adaptation, from 
Rivers I have seen which were beautiful. 
Slow rivers winding in the flat fens. 
With bands of reeds like thronged green swords 
Guarding the mirrored sky ; 
And streams down-tumbling from the chalk fiills 
To valleys of meadows and watercress-beds. 
And bridges whereunder, dark weed-coloured shadows. 
Trout flit or lie. 
to the tropical rivers, where ^ 
. . . The land bows in the darkness. 
Utterly lost and defenceless, 
Smitten and blinded and overwhelmed 
By the crashing rods of rain. 
It is impossible, of course, in so short a space to give a 
complete or exact impression of twelve years' work by a 
poet who is so varied, who has developed and experimented 
so much. And yet this collection, as I have suggested, 
does give a picture of a temperament broadening its range, 
taking in now the usual with the unusual, and expressing 
always the effect which the world has on it primarily through 
the instrument of rhythm. 
Peter Bell. 
