FICTION.

FROM GRAVE TO GAY.,

C. By Maurice Baring. (Heinemann. 15s.) C. is an enormously long book. Though written with rigid economy of phrase and the simplest vocabulary, it' reaches nearly seven hundred and fifty pages ; had the hero's name,

Caryll, been spelled throughout in full another dozen pages would have been added to the score. Abbreviated into the familiar " C." this name is characteristic of one side of Mr. Baring's method : its brevity. The other side, its comprehensiveness or unselectiveness which, in the long run, triumphs so signally over its brevity, can best be illus- trated by a quotation :-

" I adore Paris, the shops, the restaurants,' said Mrs. Tryan.

Captain Redford, too, put in a word for the Paris restaurants. ' I grant you the restaurants,' said Lady Ralph. It's extra- ordinary that there should be no such thing as a decent restaurant in London.' - The new café isn't bad,' said Captain Redford, talking of a restaurant that had just been opened."

This is only one of many similar passages. It does not set out to show up the _stupidity or triviality of the speakers,

it scarcely has that small 'grain of irony which,- sometimes intentional and sometimes not, lurks in the form and intonation of Mr. Baring's sentences. His dialogue is seldom. condensed or generalized or " clever " ; its directness and simplicity are the common property of all his characters, except the two millionaires who talk unimpeachable slang and the hard- bitten cosmopolitans who draw upon foreign idioms. It is the dialogue of every day, explanatory or -apologetic, as such

dialogue usually is. " C." explains that _a prior engagement prevents his accepting an invitation to dinner ; that he has a train to catch ; that he would rather die than enter the Diplomatic Service.'

For the novelist, there is a time to he reticent and a time to refrain from reticence. _ In some of Mr. Baring's earlier works, the habit of austerity and reticence was so pronounced that those rare and admirable qualities lost their meaning and colour. In C. their nature hai returned to them ; not entirely, for as a whole the book is a little diluted and colourless. - Bfit it has its ups and downs ; its passions avowed

by the characters both in their speech and their behaviour ;

its character-parts and its eccentrics. " C." himself is scarcely a character-part. We are told all about his life, from the nursery through the -school-room, the private school, Eton,' Paris, Germany, Oxford, Rome : we know that he served in a Government office in London, that he was a War- carrel spondent in South Africa, that he was in love, moderately, with a good woman and head-over-heels with a bad one : we are told that from all these experiences he got little content. and much suffering, that he wanted to write and yet didn't, that his life had been, as one of his friends said, " a conflict of values." Yet he never attains the stature, spiritual or moral, quite to fulfil these varied roks. We know how much people cared for him, what they were prepared to do for him, but all this allusion and indirect information never puts us fully in touch with him ; he remains a phantom ship, to which so many people had entrusted real and valued cargoes, destined never to " materialize," never to come into port. There is a crescendo, a cumulative effect of wasted energies and unfulfilled promise that deepens and dignifies the close of the book ; but they scarcely succeed' in making it tragic, as they would have done if " C." had declared himself a person instead of an initial, dowered with the attributes and purposes (however frustrated) of a person, instead of the conflicting echoes of opinion and"the adumbrations of great

deeds. . One cannot leave Mr. Baring's book without commenting on the really flawless quality of its emotion. That emotion might well be greater in volume ; it could not be purer or clearer, felt more finely or expressed more appropriately. It gives his book an air and tone of faultless taste.

The possession of this is, perhaps, his only link with Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, in every other respect his direct antithesis. Mr. Wodehouse's vocabulary is rich and rare, studded, A is true, with foreign importations, many of the forcible but few of them elegant. Inveterately facetious, he likes to call a thing by any other name but its own. "'The browsing and sluicing are good," says Uckridge of his aunt's house, meaning, one imagines, that -there is pleuty VS-eat:anti drink ; and the same character, when unexpectedly confronted by this terrifying relation, is brilliantly described as " shrinking into his mackintosh like a snail surprised while eating lettuce." Mr. Wodehouse has little interest in character-drawing;; his plots, or rather the plots of the egregious Uckridge to make a rapid fortune, though diverting and ingenious, are farcical at the core; but his humour is of a high -quality. Often it springs from his situations and often, too, it seems to have an agreeable power of nourishing itself. Though it feels its creator's whip and spur it enjoys running, and though we feel he can force its pace we do not feel, as with so many humorists, that he could stop it. There are, of course, fiat passages in Uckridge; but the percentage of jokes that do not come off is low, and a humorist is intolerable not because -he makes few good jokes but because he makes many bad ones, because, in fact, it is possible to take the measure of his humour and anticipate the moment of its application.

The scrupulous self-criticism shared in their (Efferent

ways by Mr. Baring and Mr. Wodehouse does not quite go round, as it were, to Mr. Yates. There is plenty of plot and humour and excitement in And Five were Foolish, but, if called upon to make the choice, one would -rather read it to oneself than out loud. The stories are intermittently serious, in two or three cases extremely painful. They are essentially-fiction, and show joy and zest in the telling, but the improbability of the incidents and the recklessness and insobriety of the treatment put them outside ordinary experi- ence without making them romantic.

L. P. HARTLEY.