16 
LAND 6? WATER 
September 26, 1918 
The Reader's Diary 
Recent Novels , 
THE trouble with the modern English novel is 
often simply that the modem English novelist 
does not take enough trouble over his work. He 
has his rate of production. He brings out a 
novel once a year or sometimes twice in three 
years ; and writers with a real talent for the novel go through 
their whole careers without ever producing anything of 
lasting value, merely because they will not put enough hard 
thought into their conception or enough hard work into 
their writing. Sometimes they fail because they will not 
make their books long enough, and give us sketches instead 
of novels, sometimes — as in the case of Mr. Wells — because 
they will not work up their material enough to give every 
page an equal intensity. 
I have before me this week two books which seem to me 
to be adequate examples of these two tendencies. Mr. W. B. 
Maxwell's The Mirror and the Lamp (Cassell, 7s. net) is long 
enough for its author to have said everything he needed to 
say ; and it is written by the same hand as that excellent 
novel In Cotton Wool. It contains, too, passages of really 
close work, good observation, humour, and passionate appre- 
hension of its theme. But its hero, Edward Churchill, who 
begins by devoting his life to the Church, then loses his 
faith, runs away with the ill-treated wife of a trade imion 
official and, after many adventures, in -some vague way 
recovers his faith, flickers before the reader and eludes his 
observation like a star continually obscured by clouds. 
Edward's boyhood and many of the scenes in his East End 
curacy are presented solidly and well. The growth of his 
unlawful love for Lilian and his struggles against it are 
convincingly told. But the loss of his faith is stated in a 
way which is at once vague and bald ; the deep psychological 
causes of it are barely stated ; and the reader is left wondering 
how much, if anything, Lilian had to do with it. This is, 
I think, not due to laziness, but to Mr. Maxwell's inability 
to get a whole and clear vision of his subject. The end of 
the book, in which Edward becomes a famous novelist and 
returns to the Church, whether of his own volition or to 
please his wife and friend no man can tell, is merely 
slovenly, 
The fault of Mrs. Desmond MacCarthy in A Pier and a 
Band (Chatto & Windus, 6s. net) is, on the other hand, 
sketchiness and not either inequality or imperfect apprehen- 
sion. She has, I should judge, a talent for the novel naturally 
greater than that of Mr. Maxwell. Her persons come easily 
alive, her scenes are vivid, and her use of language is 
unaffected, graceful, and charming. She has, in particular, 
the indefinable but distinct and distinguishable quality of 
being able to interest a reader at once with the smallest 
expenditure of effort on his part. Her story, too, is good. 
A beautiful place in the West Country, Watersmouth, is 
dominated by two estates, both of which are seriously 
embarrassed. The owner of one, Victor Villiers, cedes to 
the importunities of Mr. Tippits, who wishes to convert 
Watersmouth into a seaside resort, and so restores his fortunes. 
The owner of the other. Sir John Forest, violently rejects 
Mr. Tippit's overtures, makes his heir, Antony, promise not 
to sell the estate, and passes it on to him in so crippled a 
condition as to forbid marriage or any decent sort of life. 
Antony has fallen in love with Perdita Villiers, but forbears 
to tell her so, and absorbs himself in the interests of an 
impoverished landowner. Perdita is hurt, but after a visit 
to the court of an exceedingly minute German principality, 
recovers and marries some one else. All that is wrong with 
the book is that Mrs. MacCarthy has not allowed herself 
room to use up all its possibilities. Her characters and her 
situations are true and good, so far as they go, but they 
are not sufficiently approfondis. Another fifty pages might 
well have been devoted to the change produced in Antony's 
character by his situation, and at least as much to Perdita's 
recovery from her love for him, while the German Court, 
amusing as it is, is by no means exhausted by the amount 
of attention which it receives here. But this severity of 
criticism is perhaps an ungrateful way of receiving a pleasant, 
entertaining, and promising new novel. 
For those who do not fatigue their eyes watching for the 
Great English Novel, I can recommend Rotorua Rex (Skeifing- 
ton, 6s. net), by Mr. J. Allan Dunn, a tale of adventure in 
the South Seas, and one of the most exciting that I have read 
for a considerable time. It has a scene of pursuit and escape 
which will make the reader's eyes bulge out of his {i^ad. 
The Country 
I imagine that of all those who have read the minute 
nature studies which appear (or used to appear) every morning 
on the leader-page of the Daily Mail, more have been exercised 
by wondering what the initials P.W!D.L could possibly 
stand for than have been enthralled by the studies them- 
selves. This question is now answered by the publication 
of Homeland : a Year of Country Days (Richmond, 7s. 6d. 
net), which bears the name of Mr. Percy W. D. Izzard on its 
title-page. This is a style of literature, which rather exposes 
itself to parody ; and it must have needed some courage to 
publish a volume made up of strings of passages like this: 
There are snatches of lark-song to be heard over those 
fields still ; but the chorus of the larks is thinning. Their 
quiet season is at hand. Early in the morning the willow- 
warbler sang in his favourite copse on the common-side, 
and later, in the same place, the soft trilling of a greenfinch 
was heard. On the common itself the linnets sing now, 
amid the sun-warmed thickets where the gorse-pods crack. 
I am inclined to think that I could do that myself without 
the expense of going into the country or the trouble of finding 
out the name of the birds and flowers : 
K T On the common this morning an early sheep-tit was 
^i' practising his flute-like notes in the boughs of a slugbe ry- 
f bush, over a great patch of grandmother's apron in full 
I snowy flower. The sheep- tit is a late arrival in these 
. islands ; but, like his near relative, the dog-finch, he is very 
^.^ fond of singing in daylight. . . . 
No ; after all, Mr. Izzard has had the trouble and the expense. 
The animals and plants in his book are all real animals and 
plants, and they do behave, I daresay, , much as he says 
they do. For those who canhot get near the country (too 
many of us in these days) Mr. Izzard's sketches will serve as 
reminders of unobtainable delights. The brok contains illus- 
trations by Mrs. (?) F. L. Izzard and Mr. W. Gordon Mein. 
I do not thin'': the drawings can have been very good, to 
begin with, but the process of reproduction has simply pole- 
axed them. 
Other Volumes 
There are war books of all kinds — if the truism may be 
excused — and nothing seems to diminish their production. 
On the Threshold of War, by Mr. Nevil Monroe Hopkins 
(Lippincott, 21s. net), is the exceedirg naive diary of an 
American traveller who visited England, Fnmce, Germany, 
and Russia immediately before the war, and was in Paris 
at its outbreak. After that he managed to get involved in 
the .firing-line for a brief space, went to Antwerp, and was 
arrested successively by the Belgans and the French, and 
returned. to America. I do net think there is much in his 
reminiscences to justify this large and expensive vo'ume, 
which is illustrated by reproductions of German proclama- 
tions, 1 tters to the author from ambassadors and such, 
and his card of identity. Still, it is written simply, and 
contains an entertaining though far from edifying account 
of the behaviour of the American tourists who were strarded 
in Paris by the outbreak of hostilities. These t ersons seem 
to have imagined that mobilisation, war, and all the opera- 
tions of European State-craft and strategy ovght to be 
suspended in order to allow them to return in comfort to 
their homes ; and they besieged the American Embasfy 
accordingly. It is only fair to remember that the tourists 
of any nation in any given capital would be able to produce 
enough of this type to obscure their mere reasonable fellow- 
countrymen. Of Mr. Hopkin=; as an observer of war condi- 
tions an adequate idea is given by one sentence, descriptive 
of what caught his eye in London: "Lord Kitchener was 
the biggest man in England and boy scouts were conspicuous 
in all directions." 
The Flying Poilu, by Marcel Radaud (Hod^er & Stoughton, 
7s. 6d. net), is an account, under the guise of f ction, of life 
in the French A iation Corps. The hero, Chig ole, is a 
Parisian street urchin who advances from mechanician to 
observer, and then, because he is refured promotion to pilot, 
demands, in pique, to be transferred to the infantry. The 
translation, without being in incorrect English, gives as 
completely unfamiliar a twist to oiu: language as can well 
be imagined. 
How we Twisted the Dragon's Tail, by Percival Hislam 
(Hutchinson, 2s. net), is a good, clear narrative, founded on 
the official sources, of the naval operation.s at Zeebrugge 
and Ostend. The illustrations are excellent. Peter Bell. 
