30 
LAND & WATER 
December 19, 191 8 
The Readers Diaru 
Recent Novels 
IT was inevitable that Miss Irene Rutherford McLecd, 
should write a novel ; and, except that the paper, 
jacket, which represents a flight of steps, apparently 
covered with a plague of flies and decorated with a 
pair of imitation lace curtains, is rather surprising 
I have nothing much to complain of in the fact. Indeed 
lier Graduation (Chatto & Windus, 6s. net) is very much 
better than I anticipated. As I expected, it begins with the 
unhappy childhood of a strange and sensitive girl, who 
suffers much by not being understood. She grows up (Miss 
McLeod mercifully forbears to linger over lier extreme 
vouth), enters into happier surroundings, has an unfortunate 
love affair with a worthless painter, a more fortunate one 
with a genius, who dies and ends, felicitous at last, in mar- 
riage with a young and wealthy poet. Much of this could, 
I think, have been foretold, in the main lines at all events, 
by an experienced reader who had not opened the book. 
It is the recognised pattern for a first novel by a young and 
clever writer. What nobody, not even my reckless self, 
would have dared to foretell is the fact that all these people 
are alive, and that the events through which they move 
have interest and verisimilitude. Martm, the genius who 
dies young, has written a book about love (rather, one gathers, 
like a book by Mr. Edward Carpenter, though not, I hope, 
quite like), and it seems to me to indicate real talent in 
Miss McLeod that she should have made both him and the 
effect of his book on his friends quite credible. I do not 
mean that I rise from Graduation convinced that Martin's 
book was a work of genius ; but I am convinced that Frieda 
and Alan thought so. Alan, the young poet, is lightly but 
livingly sketched. Again, I believe in him but not in his 
genius. He is the sort of young man who twenty years ago 
would have written ballades and rondeaux, and to-day is 
writing little " stop-shorts," copied from the Greek anthology. 
From all this I deduce that Miss McLeod's instincts and 
instinctive artistry are better developed than her powers 
of intellectual judgment. Her people are not altogether 
what she believes them to be ; but she has felt them much 
more truly than she has observed them. Now that is a 
fine way to begin ; apd this instinctive feeling for character 
is the surest guarantee of truth in a novel. But before 
Miss McLeod can go very far she must develop the power 
of judgment and learn to know her characters. Otherwise, 
she will perplex the reader, as here, by making statements 
about them that are palpably false. It is better than she 
should do this than that she should make such statements 
about them as will lead us to conclude they never existed ; 
and perhaps the best is yet to come. 
Miss Madge Mears in The Flapper's Mother (Lane, 6s. net) 
shows no want of ihtellectual power. If such a classification 
had ever been invented, I should say that this was an ad- 
mirable example of the " well-made " novel. The characters 
are as real as they need be to carry the story along ; and 
they wheel into their places for the successive situations of 
the book with as much precision as though they were a com- 
pany of the Guards (the old Guards) at drill. But Miss 
Mears' powers are such that I wonder rather why she wastes 
them on this cardboard tragedy of the fllapper who had a 
misfortune, her loVer with his mad wife, her mother with 
her vanished husband, and the chivalrous muff of a rector's 
son, who is rather like the well-intentioned clown tripping 
up people engaged on earnest business. She does it ex- 
tremely well ; but if she tried to do something a little more 
difficult the result might be on another plane altogether. 
Mr. J. Storer Clouston used t® write humorous books, and 
he wrote one. The Prodigal Father, which I remember with 
gratitude as bemg very humorous indeed. His new book, 
The Man from the Clouds (Blackwood, 6s. net), is a spy- 
story and a good specimen of its kind. The contrivance 
by which a R.N.V.R. man drops from an escaped balloon 
on to a Scottish island and, imagining it to be Germany, ' 
speaks in the dark in German to a prowling spy, is admirable. 
His endeavours to discover again the man who answered 
his German hail, the false clues he follows up, the suspicion 
he draws on himself, and the denouement in which the spy 
is discovered to be— sometliing I have no intention of dis- 
closing, all make a first-rate story, which I heartily recom- 
mend. 
Occasional Reading 
There are few things in the world easier than writing a 
weekly discourse on books and similar things ; but to write- 
it well is altogether another matter. It may be that some 
readers of Solomon Eagle's Books in General (Seeker, 6s. 
net) will put the book down under the impression that this 
is as easy as falling off a log. The mistake will be put right 
whin they reflect that if to give so much pleasure as this 
book contains is as simple a business as it looks, it is odd 
that so few people do it. The truth is that the secret of 
these papers is quite Iiidden under their charm and apparent 
want of effort. They deal with all sorts of subjects likely 
to entertain readers with a taste for letters, from misprints 
in the Times to the Baconian theory, frcm the obscurity 
of Henry James to the choice of a word to replace the ob- 
noxious word " Colonial," from music-hall songs to the 
women of Shakespeare. This diversity is unified by the 
fact that Eagle hardly ever fails to be entertaining. However 
huge or trivial the subject, it is always approached by the 
same method, with respect for what is respectable in it and 
derision for what is not ; and the wisdom of Solomon, however 
deeply it may be engaged, is rarely unilluminated by some 
agile effort of fancy or turn of speech or by the discovery of 
something ridiculous which is presented to the reader as a 
tit-bit. The peril under which papers of this kind lie is, of 
course, that wit applied to great subjects may turn unawares 
into mere facetiousness ; and it is remarkable with what skill 
Solomon Eagle avoids this catastrophe. The secret of it 
is that he is genuinely interested in the things of which he 
writes ; not only concerned to be flippant upon them ; and, 
this being so, it is no irreverence but a useful as well as a 
witty comment when he calls Shakespeare " the Porcupine 
of Avon " or remarks of Wordsworth that his portraits 
and biographies leave " the impression of an old bore to whom 
one would not be rude simply and solely because one would 
not hurt the feelings of a person so worthy." A better 
combination than real respect for what is good in literature 
with a refusal to be awed into portentousness by anything 
whatsoever could hardly be found ; and Solomon "Eagle adds 
to this a gift for easy writing and ingenious phrases which 
completes his equipment. Some of his best sentences are 
less irresistible out of their context than in it ; but I think 
I should have been tickled anywhere by the remark on a 
writer named Allene Gregory that " as I cannot tell from the 
name whether she is a gentleman or a lady I shall call him 
Miss." Mr. Eagle's desire to produce " the sort of book that 
one reads in, without tedium, for ten minutes before one goes 
to sleep " is perhaps a little modest, but though the period 
of reading will be longer and there are other times and places 
for which it is as well suited (e.g., in trains), he has certainly 
produced an admirable book for occasional reading. There 
are more of these papers in the quarries of the New Statesman ; 
and they ought to be dug out. 
Thoughts of an Admiral 
In her introduction to Pages and Portraits from the Past 
(Jenkins, 2 vols., 24s. net) which contains the private papers 
of Admiral Sir WiUiam Hotham, Mrs. Stirling points out 
with some little pride that the Admiral considered neither 
Napoleon nor Nelson to be a gentleman. This suggests 
to the impartial observer, not so much that Napoleon and 
Nelson are consequently to be condemned, as that the Ad- 
miral's standards of judgment proved rather poor things 
when the greatness of a subject put any strain upon them. 
And so It proves to be. Yet the Admiral knew nearly 
everybody of note in the period of the Napoleonic wars and 
after and set down his impressions with great care and 
honesty. As a result, his papers are of great interest and 
value, when allowance is made for his own rather narrow 
outlook. His account of the mutiny at the Nore, that 
well-known episode of which so little is known, is particularlv" 
good ; and, if he thinks rather too highly of the powers and 
virtues of other admirals exactly like himself, he does give 
an excellent picture of the world as it appeared to an English 
admiral at the time. Peter Bell 
