22 
LAND y WATER 
October 31, 1918 
Recent Novels 
1^ /W ^- EDEN PHILLPOTTS is, I suppose, the 
1% ■ /■ most consistent and industrious novelist that 
% / I ever Hved. You take your eye off him and 
^^ I his works for ten years or so, and when you 
J^ » JL replace it you find him still patiently writing 
large, grey, careful novels with^a seduction in them, or, at 
least,' a case of illegitimacy. Some years ago he completed 
a very exhaustive series of stories about Devonshire, and 
then, feehng, one imagines, that it was unmethodical to 
write fiction in a haphazard way as it came, he announced 
that he intended to execute a scries of tales about the minor . 
industries of England. I remember that the first two of. 
these books were described to me (I did not read them) as 
dealing respectively with Pottery and the Law of Illegitimacy 
and Oysters and Free Love— an ingenious mingling of two 
kinds of instruction. Now comes a new volume, called 
The Spinneys (Heinemann, 7s. net), and with it come, I 
regret to say, the inevitable seduction and the everlasting 
love-child. But the setting of the story is, so far 
as I know, original. I cannot remember that any novelist 
has ever before made use of the rope and string industry in 
the Bridport district. Nor, on full consideration, can I say 
that Mr. Pliillpotts has really made use of it. The principal 
male character, Raymond (one hesitates to call him a hero), 
owns a mill, and the heroine, Sabina Dinnett, works in it. 
But I do not think that the course of affairs between them 
would have gone very differently if their fortunes had lain 
in the tanning trade or the ready-made clothes industry. 
What happened was that their illegitimate child inherited 
his mother's hatred for his father, and cherished it to the 
point of murder after it had been softened in her. This 
might have come about anyvvhere. Yet the Bridport rope 
and twine industry is, I thinlc, really worth study, and has 
a character of its own. lodo not pretend to be an expert 
on it, but I must say that I learn nothing from Mr. Phillpotts, 
except a vague, incomplete account of the processes of manu- 
facture ; while I can tell him what he has not brought out 
in his book, namely, that it is a rather poorly paid trade, 
drawing its labour from small industrial "pockets" in a 
rural district, where there is little opportunity for work- 
people to change their employment. But for Mr. 
Phillpotts the place and industry make merely a stage- 
setting for his plot ; and I have described his plot, though, 
to be sure, I have omitted the comic inn-keepers. It is 
impossible not to admire Mr. Phillpotts's careful and com- 
petent workmanship ; but it is possible to yawn over it. 
Mr. Alfred Noyes's Walking Shadows (Cassell, 7s. net) and 
M. Henri Barbusse's We Others (Dent, 6s. net) make an 
excellent contrast between the English and the French 
methods of writing a short story. M. Barbusse is all for 
brevity and "punch" ; and so in less than three hundred 
pages he gives us nearly fifty stories, each with something 
strange or heart-breaking in it, a crime or a disaster, or a 
terrible revelation of unhappiness. None of his characters 
are pleasant people, and his humour is, to say the least of it, 
savage. But his rapidly sketched inventions, the murderer 
who saved himself by heaping up too much evidence against 
himself, the minister of religion who died under suspicion of 
suicide because he had sat in a room where arsenic drifted 
down from the paint on the walls, the girl parted from her 
lover, to make his career possible, who kills herself the next 
day, but leaves letters to be sent him at intervals of years, 
telling him that she is recovering from her sorrow — these 
certainly have the quality of forcefulness at which their 
author aims. Mr. Noyes aims at persuasion rather than 
"punch" ; and though his ten stories are competently put 
together and interesting enough to hold the attention, they 
do not rise much above the level of the magazines. One of 
them, however, does rival M. Barbusse in horror. It describes 
how the captain of a German merchant submarine sent to 
America with a packet of diamonds, escaped through his 
conning-tower, leaving his crew to drown, how he set up in 
the States on the proceeds of the diamonds as a retired 
Dutch skipper, and how, in a moment of excitement, he told 
the story to his young American wife and her brother. It 
is not a pretty tale, but it is very well told. 
Tyl Ulenspiegel 
It is a happy thought which has brought out Mr. Geoffrey 
Whitworth's version of Charles de Coster's Legend of Tyl 
Ulenspiegel (Chatto & Windus, 7s. 6d. net) now, when the 
Belgian towns are beginning to appear again — and this time 
with a joyous significance — in the war news. For the descrip- 
tion of it as the "national epic of Flanders" has much more 
meaning than such phrases usually have. Tyl is an epical 
figure — he is known in Germany as Eulenspiegel, and has 
made an appearance in England under the name of Owl- 
glass— and de Coster has treated him in a truly epical manner, 
making much more than a mere historical novel out of tlie 
rising of the Low Countries against Philip II. I do not 
propose to embark here upon a definition of the epic. But 
I think I may be allowed to assume that it has, among others, 
two characteristic qualities. In the first place, the heroes 
of epic transcend ordinary human nature in the greatness 
of their attributes ; and "it does not matter whether these 
are heroism, humour, or a capacity for eating. In the second 
place, the heroes and the events through which they move 
are on so great a scale and are described with so great a sweep 
of' the brush that there is no necessity to number the story 
with the modern and peddling business of psychology and 
motive. Tyl Ulenspiegel fulfils these conditions admirably. 
De Coster does not make us feel that we might have met 
Tyl and Lamme Goedzak. He does not even make us feel 
that we understand always why they behave as they do ; 
but he does convince us beyond all doubt or quibble that 
they exist— Tyl, the embodiment of high spirits, ingenuity, 
and steadfastness, Lamme, the incarnation of a healthy and 
happy appetite for good food and drink. And all the adven- 
tures of Tyl and his friends have this quality of reality in 
fairyland, whether they are grotesque or tragic, Lamme 
scouring Flanders in search of his wife like a tearful Colonel 
Newnham-Davis, Claes burning at the stake as a heretic, 
Katheline drowned to prove that she is not a witch, and 
the young Philip burning his pet 'monkey alive in a dark 
corner of the Escurial. The book has tragedy enough in it 
to balance its bpisterous comedy, but the two are combined 
in a style whose generosity and exuberance make their 
union complete and satisfactory. As an example of the 
style, I will give" an extract from the speech made by a party 
of blind men who arrive at an inn, each supposing, errone- 
ously, that Tyl has given one of the others nine florins for 
a feast for them all. It is a rich and characteristic passage, 
one that touches me, I own, very nearly in these days : 
Bacon and peas, hotchpotch-.of beef and veal, chicken 
and lamb ! And where are the sausages — were they made 
for the dogs, pray ? And who is he that has smelt out the 
black and wliite puddings in the passage without collaring 
them for us ? I used to be able to see them, alas, in the 
days when my poor eyes were bright as candles ! And 
where is the buttered koekebakken of Anderlecht ? Sizzling 
in the frying-pan, juicy and crackling, enough to make a 
fish thirsty for drink 1 Ho, there 1 But who will bring 
me eggs and ham, or ham and eggs, twin friends of my 
palate ? 
It is a great book, indeed. Mr. Whitworth is to be con- 
gratulated on his excellently easy and vivid translation ; 
and the wood-cuts by M. Albert Delstanche, by which it is 
illustrated, are all exceedingly impressive and many exceed- 
ingly beautiful. 
Pictures of the Fleet 
I conjecture that Sea Fights of the Great War, by W. L. 
Wyllie, R.A., and M. F. Wren (Cassell, 12s. 6d. net), exists 
rather for the sake of Mr. Wyllie's pictures than for the 
sake of the text, which describes in a rather scrappy and 
disconnected way the naval events of the first twelve months 
of the war. Unfortunately the reproduction of the pictures 
in colour has not been achieved very well or clearly ; and 
some of them lose their effect, whether they are regarded as 
representations of actual events or merely from the aesthetic 
point of view. Some of the drawings in black and white, 
particularly on^ of a monitor and another of a torpedoed 
cruiser being towed into port, are excellent. 
Peter Bell. 
