September 19, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
15 
The Reader's Diary 
Recent Novels 
I DO like characters in novels who are pompous, ir- 
ritating and hypocritical and who are thoroughly 
exposed in all their badness at the end of the book. 
It is a simple taste ; and it is shared, I imagine, by a 
great many persons besides myself. Much of Anthony 
Trollope's popularity rests on his understanding of it ; and it 
is significant that the ' bad man ' in Mr. Archibald Marshall's 
Abington A hbey (Stanley Paul, 6s. net) should refer to Trollope's 
novels in a disrespectful way. Nothing, I suppose, in Mr. 
Marshall's world could be a more certain sign of unamialulity 
of character. It would indeed be ungrateful, almost unfilial, 
in Mr. Marshall to allow the remark to be made by a person 
not stigmatised in other ways as disagreeable ; for on him, if 
on anyone, Trollope's mantle has fallen. This novel is not 
y.xciting. The plot is extremely slender, the action very 
trivial. But it records the doings of a number of people who 
■cannot be described except as ' ' really nice " ; and among them 
the Reverend A. Salisbury Mercer, with his unfortunate 
character, stands out as anything but nice and, in his so 
obvious disagreeableness and in the snubs which are inflicted 
on him, rejoices my innocent heart. Perhaps the mutual 
devotion of the Grafton family and their unshakable habit of 
addressing one another as ' Darling ' come to be a little — 
shall I say ? — sticky by the end of the book. But nothing can 
alter the fact that they are charming people who lead charming 
lives. The reader cannot help liking them, which means that 
he cannot help liking the book. , ■ 
The characters in Mr. Maurice Hewlett's Gudrid the Fair 
(Constable, 6s. net) are equally likeable though they are not 
perhaps, in the modern sense, to be described as " nice." The 
tale is Mr. Hewlett's interpretation of two Icelandic sagas ; 
and he claims in his preface that here, as in all primitive 
poetry, character is implicit, though it has to be looked for. 
" If I read of a woman called Gudrid," he says, " and a hand- 
some woman at that, I am bound to know pretty soon what 
colour her hair was, and how she twisted it up. If I hear that 
she had three husbands and outlived them all I cannot rest 
imtil I know how she liked them, how they treated her, what 
feelings she had, what feelings they had." Therefore he has 
taken the bare and stark events of the two sagas and has 
retold them in such a way as to discover what sort of persons 
these were, how they would appear to us if we were to meet 
them in the rnodern world. It is all done in a curiously simple 
and straightforward manner which will rather surprise those 
who know Mr. Hewlett only by his early work. The somewhat 
hectic chronicler of The Forest Lovers and Richard Yea-and- 
Nay has become remarkably chastened when he can set down 
to the last detail the life of the lovely Gudrid and her three 
husbands with the economy of exclamation and rhapsody 
that he uses here. Yet he has suited his style very admirably 
to an age whose events were more romantic than the persons 
who took part in them. Gudrid, whose three husbands were 
foretold to her while she was yet a maiden, is a noble and 
attractive figure, but her love affairs are conducted with a 
view to suitability and the wishes of parents and friends far 
more than to the satisfaction of her own quite slight personal 
desires. So too her. husbands — the first two of them knowing 
themselves condemned to early death — take her and their 
own stirring adventures with comparative placidity. It is a 
queer world, with plenty of excitement and little excitability, 
where, for all their full-bloodedness, the characters take love 
and death rather in their stride. Mr. Hewlett has written a 
tale rather than a novel or a romance, but it is a very good 
tale and the persons of it do linger in the mind, particularly 
Thorstan, Gudrid's second husband, whose slow, intense affec- 
tion for her is made very real and moving. 
Mr. Douglas Newton's The War Cache (Sampson, Low,. 
Marston, 5s. net) is a rapidly moving shocker in which a sub- 
altern of the Intelligence Staff, an experimental chemist, and 
a V..'\.D. nurse discover the whereabouts of a vast German 
depository of treasure and arms in this country, and track it 
down in spite of the counter-action of a remarkably well 
organised army of spies. The independence of the three, who 
insist on carrying out the job without official assistance is 
carried a little too far when they proceed to dig up the treasure 
'themselves after locating it ; but the story would have fallen 
flat at the end if they had adopted more cautious methods. 
It is a more serious objection that the spies and their methods 
are too obviously copied from Mr. John Buchan. Still, it is 
a good story if not examined too closely, and !t is written in 
a vivid and amusing manner. 
The Means to Victory 
This is the age of international compliments ; and Mr. 
Isaac F. Marcosson and Mr. Coningsby Dawson are writers 
skilled in the paying of them. It is a happy coincidence, 
therefore, which brings out side by side Mr. Marcosson 's The 
Business of War (Lane, 5s. net), an American examination of 
British war methods, and Mr. Dawson's Out to Win (Lane, 
4s. net), a British examination of the American war-spirit ; 
and though the points of view of the two writers differ a little, 
the exchange of courtesies is close enough. Mr. Marcosson 
is an able journalist with a good deal of war experience and 
with also much experience of the methods of American ' big 
business ' before the war. In the present volume he studies 
the British mihtary organisation from the point of view of 
business, and outlines the whole system of supply, transport, 
and organisation in general on which the efficiency of the 
fighting troops in the front line depends. The machine, which 
has taken four years to build up, would take, no doubt, 
considerably more for any one man to understand in all its 
details ; and Mr. Marcosson should not be reproached, perhaps, 
for a number of inaccuracies. Still less should he be reproached 
for having accepted too jeadily the assertions of those by 
whom he was supplied with information, But his enthu- 
siasm is a little overwhelming. He is equally delighted 
when he finds tht.t business men have been put at the head of 
affairs and when he learns that technical departments are 
being directed by soldiers with no technical knowledge. Nearly 
everything he sees strikes him as miraculous ; and every- 
where his highest note of praise is to compare the efficiency 
of some branch of our military system to that of an American 
corporation — an ominous warning for the future ! But his 
account of the various organisations by which the army is 
fed, and clothed, and moved from place to place is new and 
useful ; and his unfailing wonder at our efficiency makes an 
excellent counterblast to those who see in this enormous 
improvisation nothing but a chaos of muddle. 
Curiously enough, Mr. Dawson reinforces Mr. Marcosson's 
tribute by owning that he admired as American many devices 
employed by the American arrhy, only to learn that they had 
^seen faithfully copied from ourselves. His compliments to 
our Allies are not so full-blooded as those which his colleague 
bestows on us ; and there is frequently an accent of patronage 
in his remarks which can hardly produce a good effect across 
the Atlantic. It is difficult, for example, to imagine that Mr. 
Dawson's American friends will be pleased by his statement 
that, when America declared war " my own feeling, as an 
Englishman living in New York, was merely one of relief — 
that now, when war was ended, I should be able to return to 
friends of whom I need not be ashamed." But this is set off, 
perhaps, by a very full account of the war work done by the 
Americans before they became belligerents and by his analysis 
of the grim determined spirit in which they have come into 
the struggle. This spirit he finds expressed in the chant of 
the American troops on the march, ' We've got four years to 
do this job ! ' ; and it must l^e owned that no song could be 
more terrifying for the enemy, were they only able to hear it. 
Polynesian Fairy Tales 
The customs and folk-lore of the South Sea Islands have 
come by white encroachment into so impermanent a state 
that we have every reason to be grateful to Mr. T. R. St. 
Johnston for his volume The Lau Islands and their Fairy 
Tales and Folk-lore (Times Book Co., 5s. net). Mr. St. 
Johnston, during his service as Commissioner in this group, 
which lies a little to the east of Fiji, lost no opportunity of 
picking up ancient legends from the natives with whom he 
came in touch ; and he has told ..again the best of these 
here in a pleasant unaffected style which leaves to fhem the 
best of their flavour. They have, of course, affinities with 
the folk-tales of other lands but the peculiar physical con- 
ditions of the islands gives them a special colouring which is\ 
altogether delightful. I confess to liking extremely the tale of j 
Ulupoka, a malicious god, who waaonly a head without a body. 
This head used to roll in through doorways bringing sickness 
and death to those who saw it. Now Christianity has somewhat 
chastened him, but he camouflages himself inside light palm- 
leaf baskets which are often thrown away empty ; and if 
one of these is seen Trolling rapidly over the grass when 
there is not a breath of, wind, it is well known that 
Ulupoka is inside. 
Peter Bell. 
