A GALSWORTHIAN WORTHY AND SOME OTHERS

HENRY BRINSLEY

MR. GALSWORTHY, in the "Foreword" of a novel I have just been reading—"Green Mansions"—writes with his usual quiet conviction: "Of all living authors—now that Tolstoi has gone—I could least dispense with W. H. Hudson. Why do I love his writing so? I think because he is, of living writers that I read, the rarest spirit, and has the clearest gift of conveying to me that spirit.Without apparent effort he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarged, by going there. ... He is, of course, a distinguished naturalist, probably the most acute, broad-minded, and understanding observer of Nature living . . . but that is a mere fraction of his value and interest. The expert knowledge which Hudson has of Nature gives to all his work backbone and surety of fibre, and to his sense of beauty an intimate actuality. But his real eminence and extraordinary attraction lie in his spirit and philosophy. . . . As a simple narrator he is well-nigh unsurpassed; as a stylist he has few if any living equals. ... He puts down what he sees and feels, out of sheer love of the things seen and the emotion felt; the smell of the lamp has not touched a single page that he ever wrote."

It is one thing when a mere reviewer proclaims an enthusiasm or announces a discovery. The sophisticated reader may or may not listen with interest. That depends chiefly on whether or not his own opinions in the past have squared with the reviewer's, for he feels that he is quite as able to judge of a book for himself as the mere next man—and as for reviewers, in this country, we are a sorry fraternity (or sorority), as a whole ill-trained and ill-balanced. (A lady-reviewer in The New Republic recently declared, to my delight, that anyone who objected to Mr. H. G. Wells was simply a "cretinous butler.") But when a proved artist of Mr. Galsworthy's genius proclaims an enthusiasm in the terms he applies to Mr. Hudson, the criticism assumes real importance. What one consummate craftsman says of another's performance may be taken as reasonably authoritative, if the critic is high-minded and the crafts are of a similar genre; the rest of it you may or may not agree with.

THE underlying spirit of "Green Mansions" will be a novel encounter to the reader familiar with tales of adventure. The mere outline of the story—subtitled "A Romance of the Tropical Forest"—would not declare it exceptionally unusual: a young Venezuelan, fleeing a political revolution, wanders among the savage tribes of Guiana, lives their forest life with them, discovers a lone white man .and his elfin granddaughter, falls in love with the latter and survives the tragic catastrophe that finally ensues. Certain more or less remotely analogous tales at once occur to one, of white men among savages and tropical nature—tales by Mr. de Vere Stackpoole and Mr. London, to mention minor writers, and by Mr. Conrad, to mention major. Mr. Hudson is vaguely related to the first of these, not at all to the second, and— barring style—a good deal to the third. Yet, curiously enough, because of the quality of his idealism, he betrays in "Green Mansions" a nearer kinship with Bernadin de Saint Pierre and Chateaubriand than with any modern writer I know of. The underlying motif of his tale is as philosophically idealistic, as remote from crass reality, as is that of the most inspired Eighteenth Century dreamers; and yet as he is writing in the Twentieth Century and actually knows (as they did not) every inch of the ground he covers, his work is free from the slightest trace of their artificiality and their sentimentalism, and carries with it, in its details, a singular conviction of reality, although of reality on a high lyrical plane which the average reader may not be willing to accept.

However, I must fall back in conclusion, as I began, on Mr. Galsworthy, convinced of the truth of what he says concerning Mr. Hudson: "His work is a vision of natural beauty'and of human life as it might be, quickened and sweetened by the sun and the wind and the rain, and by fellowship with all the other forms of life—the truest vision now being given to us, who are more in want of it than any generation has ever been."

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PROBABLY three-quarters of the novels published today—and, consequently, three-quarters of those sent to reviewers—are written by women, largely about women, and chiefly, I presume, for women to read, because in any community the proportion of said readers of fiction is, I daresay, about three parts feminine to one masculine. All this may be quite right and as it should be; but it is at times very puzzling to the mere male reviewer just how to take certain kinds of writing. Here are some characteristic passages from "The Boy With Wings," by Mrs. Oliver Onions (Berta Ruck), where the engaging little heroine is listening to her bosom friend: "Half the girls aren't what I call tubbed. How many of them, with bathrooms a yard from their bedrooms, bother to have a scrub at night as well as in the mornings? . . . It's at night they leave it on, powder and all, to work into themselves until that 'unfresh' look gets chronic. My dear, I tell you that the two-bath-a-day rule would give us less of the Lonely-and-Neglected Women Problem. . . . Men like what they call a 'healthy-looking' girl. As often as not it simply means the girl happens to be specially clean. Beauty's skin-deep: moral, look after your skin. Now, you do. No soap on your face, Taff?"

"No; just a 'clean' after washing, with Oatine and things like that," etc., etc.

I can't help feeling, as any gentleman should, that for me to read all this is an unwarrantable intrusion —and yet I am professionally invited to express an opinion. Well, the only fair thing to do is to plead complete incompetence and let it go at that. I also feel, however, that back of all this chiffonnerie and back of a cloying sentimentality of treatment, Mrs. Onions, has an idea for her story—of a young aviator and his beloved in war time—that is essentially poetic and, therefore, essentially beautiful, which is a good deal more than can be said of most novels of the chiffonesque school. A more developed taste and a more active discretion would bring out the finer traits in Mrs. Onions' real talent which a rapidly growing popularity bids fair to smother.

"THE HOUSE OF WAR," by Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall, will "be welcome to readers who enjoyed his "Said the Fisherman" and "Veiled Women." I am not sure but that an enjoyment of his novels may be a rather "special" taste, for his chosen field is the Near East, and no one can quite catch the fineness and justness of his flavor who has not visited and fallen in love with the places and peoples he has appropriated. Mr. Hichins will give you a Near East, and will people it with Turks, Arabs, Syrians and Egyptians, with such intensely colorful strokes that even a home-loving Yankee villager cannot escape the conviction of novel and fascinating things seen—and smelt. But Mr. Pickthall, if less of a genius, knows the life, particularly that of Asia Minor, far more subtly, is content with quieter methods, and is less helpfully obvious. Consequently his greatest appeal is to the already initiate. "The House of War" is a diverting comedy of the conflict between a little community of Christian Arabs, their Muslim Arab neighbors, some English missionaries (in chief, the rabid—and pretty—niece of two old maiden ladies), the gallant young local sheykh and the wise old Turkish Governor. Shake well with a light touch, sprinkle with a very keen sense of humor, and you have a thoroughly commendable book which the knowing traveler will prize above Baedeker's.

MR. IVOR BROWN has taken a leaf out of Mr. Compton Mackenzie's book (or, to be more accurate, 318) and given us in "Years of Plenty" what his publishers describe as "the day-by-day life of a lad in prep, school and later in the university." I think we're all getting a little fed-up with these young-boy biographers and I don't feel that this life of Master Martin Leigh will stand at the head of them, although it is gently interesting and very pleasantly written.

BOOKS REVIEWED

GREEN MANSIONS By W. H. Hudson

Alfred A. Knopf, New York $1.50

THE BOY WITH WINGS By Berta Ruck

Dodd, Mead & Co., New York ' $1.35

THE HOUSE OF WAR By Marmaduke Pickthall

Eveleigh Nash, London 6s.

YEARS OF PLENTY By Ivor Brown

George H. Doran Co., New York $1.25

STORIES WITHOUT WOMEN By Donn Byrne

Hearst's International Library Co., New York $1.25