18 
LAND ^ WATER 
October 24, 1918 
Recent Novels 
MK. FRANK SWINNERTON is justly reckoned 
among the rising hopes of the English novel ; 
but I wish he would get through with rising 
and proceed on a level plane. His first book 
was published, if my memory is correct, as 
long ago as 1909, and his new story, Shops and Houses 
(Methuen, 7s. net), makes the eighth that he has to his credit. 
It is true that he has improved a good deal since he began, 
but his progress has been very unsteady ; and one can never 
rely on him to maintain the improvement he has made in 
any given novel. Last year's volume, Nocturne, marked a 
great advance because it was all of a piece. This year's is 
more disjointed, and harks back to earlier faults.- Yet it is 
an exceedingly good piece of work. Mr. Swinnerton's quali- 
fications for fiction are a strong sense of Immour, a com- 
petent and decisive style, and real intellectual power. His 
weakness is a tendency to overcharge parts of the can\as, 
so that some of his characters have sometimes an air of 
having strayed in from some other book — not always one of 
Mr. Swinnerton's books. Thus the Hughes girls here, with 
their small furtive amours and their perpetual manoeuvres 
to be publicly and safely married, have come over in large 
part from Samuel Butler ; and much of their malaise is 
obviously due to a desire to be back where the atmosphere 
is more continuously ironic. But the saddest inconsistency 
is that shown in the portraiture of Beckwith, a small all but 
suburb in Surrey, where public opinion dragoons everybody, 
and particularly the young, into conformity with a useless 
social standard. Beckwith is now drawn by Mr. Swinnerton 
with the gentle, incisive irony that it deserves as a monster 
terrible only to those who believe in it ; and this is what, 
in fact, it is. But presently he pulls out a quite unnecessary 
tragic stop and shows his young men and maidens finding 
safety in flight from a malignant and loathsome dragon. 
But, really, the innocent appearance of William Vechantor 
and his family, as grocers in a suburb in which their cousins 
lead society, would hardly have produced the effects Mr. 
Swinnerton insists on. Emanuel Vechantor, represented 
here as a confirmed savourer of Gibbon, would not have 
been so distressed about the grocer ; and the cut dehvered 
by suburban mothers and daughters does not make such 
havoc in the lives of suburban young men. Yet nearly all 
the characters portrayed are good, lifehke, and original, if 
only their creator would always allow them to behave in 
character. 
William the grocer, his wife, and his children, Dorothy 
and Reg., are, if not triumphs of invention, then cer- 
tainly triumphs of observation. Louis is also good, 
except in the fact that he feels himself more in the dark 
about ..the motives of other people than it is probable he 
would feel in real life. Novelists, confronted vidth the neces- 
sity of imagining what goes on inside the hearts of others, 
realise only too acutely that the souls of their fellows are 
indeed trackless wastes ; and they commonly assume a. 
realisation of this fact equally acute in their chief characters. 
But I think that Louis Vechantor would have earlier made 
up his mind, at least as a working h3rpothesis, that Veronica 
Hughes was trying, "rather meanly, to marry him. 
I am somewhat handicapped in writing about Mrs. Belloc- 
Lowndes' Out of the War ? (Chapman & Hall, 7s. net) by the 
fact that an unwary and detestable reviewer had disclosed 
to me the answer to its riddle before I began the book myself. 
I cannot say, therefore, whether the secret would really be 
kept as long as the author intends. I think, on the whole, 
that it would ; an'd, if it would, Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes has 
produced the cleverest and most subtly sketched German 
spy that has figured in fiction since the attempt became 
popular. I will not say more, for fear of spoihng some one 
else's interest in the taJe. 
Not so A Chhste Man, by Mr. Louis Wilkinson (Heinemann, 
6s. net). Mr. ' Wilkinson is a vtery clever amateur, whose 
invention is unequal, but whose nose for the sordid is invari- 
ably true. If I am going to have nasty or ineffective people 
as the sole inhabitants of a novel, I prefer to have the novel 
well designed and written. Mr. Wilkinson has an indi\'idual 
talent, but he has much to learn. 
All About Russia 
I am every day more and more surprised by the 
numbers of people who know all about Russia and have 
known about it all the time. Princess Catherine Radziwill 
knew so much that she said in 1915 or igi6, of lier 
book, Russia's Decline and Fall (CasscU, 7s. 6d. net), 
that she was writing "because I feel that it may help, 
to explain some other momentous events, which I fore- 
see, and of which it seems to me that the dawn is at 
hand." As the last sentence of the book states that "people 
had shown the army that the soul of Russia was with them ; 
they had shown the enemy that, despite traitors, they were 
out to win ; they would show the world that though the 
past had been punctuated with disaster and retreat, hence- 
forth they were fighting as one, a nation with its back to 
the wall, determined to avert annihilation, eager to do its 
part in securing peace to a blood-drenched and slaughter- 
weary world" — as this is the note on which the princess 
closes we are left somewhat in doubt as to the nature of the 
things which presented themselves to her prophetic soul. 
There is no doubt as to what she saw in her capacity as a 
contemporary observer. She saw reaction enthroned and 
determined to make the best it could for itself out of the 
war. She saw scandals, muddles, and blunders of which 
we were informed in England only that the reports might 
be contradicted. And she saw — this is an amusing anc^ 
instructive detail — the Grand Duke Nicholas occupying 
most of his time in playing large-scale practical jokes on 
the Jews, both inside the army and outside— a picture 
curiously opposed to that which we were given at the"time, 
in all our newspapers, of the Tsardom's change of heart. 
Mr. Farbman's omniscience does not begin to be really 
important until after the Revolution. The best thing in 
liis book Russia and the Struggle for Peace (Allen & Unwin, 
3s. 6d. net) is the discovery that Russia crumbled be>;ause 
the reactionary forces hampered the democratic reorganisa- 
tion of the army— a process which, he thinks, would have 
been satisfactorily achieved by the thorough application of 
the celebrated Order No. i. If, as one may suppose, he 
ideatifies the reactionary forces with the officers of the army, 
it must be confessed that they paid heavily enough and in 
large enough numbers for their ill-guided interference. 
Baron Graevenitz, in Autocracy to Bolshevism (Allen and 
Unwin, 4s. 6d. net), is perhaps too gravely prejudiced a 
witness for Mr. Farbman to take seriously, for he was an 
officer at the front while the famous democratic reorganisa- 
tion was being carried out, and the fear that he was in of 
being summarily executed by his own men seems to have 
instilled in him a dislike for Order No. i, which proves his 
reactionary tendencies. For those who are accustomed, 
however, to judge evidence as it comes, without precon- 
ceptions, his simple, naive, and by no means over-subtle 
narrative gives a convincing picture of the crumbling on 
the front ; and I prefer it to Mr. Farbman's undoubted 
subtlety of exposition. But, then, Mr. Farbman is sg subtle 
as to be frequently not a little puzzling. The villains, the 
trebly dyed villains of his highly coloured piece, are invari- 
ably the Allies ; and one wonders what made him think it 
opportune to publish so bitter an attack on Entente policy 
when all the mischief is done and when the facts are too 
obscurely known, even to Mr. Farbman, for the time to be 
ripe for the meting out of historical justice. Mr. Stebbing's 
From Czar to Bolshevik (Lane, 12s. 6d. net) is much the 
largest of these four books, and might therefore lead one to 
suppose th'at Mr. Stebbing knows much the most about 
Russia. As a matter of fact, he gives us here a quite read- 
able and not unduly cocksure diary of his experiences in 
Petrograd in 1917 and igrS. It would have been better 
if he had managed to get the names of the Russian 
parties a little clearer in his book ; the confusion in which 
he presents Cadets, Socialists, Maximalists, Minimilists, 
Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks, suggests that he never quite 
got them clear in his own head. But perhaps these four 
books have a cumulative virtue which is denied to them 
individually. Our surest way of going wrong is to believe 
that any one person knows all that there is to be known 
about Russia. ■ Peter Beli.. 
